The Tourist

​

To collect photographs is to collect the world.  - Susan Sontag

​

'The Tourist' explores reproductive processes and plays on the construction of place through found images, tokens, maps, postcards and travel guides to evoke memories of place. 

​​

"Wish you were here" are a series of Django Fontina postcards which are a type of postcard written and posted to strangers as a means of distributing poetry.  The typed poems reconfigures text from old postcards, most dating from the 1970s that were sent from popular tourist destinations around Britain.  The postcards forming the "Wish you were here" series are in pairs, each poem accompanied by a continuous-line drawing of a map identifying the location.

​

Participants were invited to contribute a Lonely Planet guide from their own personal library to create a book installation "Passages".  The collective travel anthology accumulates locations and stories of their travels typewritten on cards.  Participants were asked to identify a couple key locations they found memorable.  The books in the collection are well travelled and used; the books themselves have been faithful travel companions, taken around the world to places like India, Colombia, Brazil and Thailand.  Others books remain pristine, reminders of places participants dream of going to one day, but for now sit on their shelves.