the postcard project

 This project started around 2000 and grew out of my interest in tourist postcards from Italy. I became fascinated by how well they were composed and by the use of retouching as well as the occasional touch of audacity in moving landmarks (or even the sun) around.

My initial intention was to create a set of postcards that could sit alongside these traditional ones in a rack. Despite the implication that the original postcards were a true representation of the place I wanted to emphasise that they were actually just as much an artifice designed to create a particular impression of the place. This notion of things not being what they appeared to be was behind the first set of collages I made.

Of course since I started making the works the whole nature of communications has changed and the postcard as a tourist souvenir is now in rapid decline as the facility to instantly transmit images via phone has made them redundant.

While I have been pursuing these themes my ideas have wandered off in all sorts of directions and pondered things like the use of spacial systems, memory and nostalgia, sense of place and what it is about a place that makes it identifiable - all very profound I’m sure, but most of all I have been having great fun investigating what can be done with the postcard format.

All the series are based on ten postcard views of different places in Italy. They can be viewed as sets as shown by the series title or alternatively you can view all the different versions of a single postcard view.

Because it is an ongoing project not all the series are complete and so have fewer images.