PORTFOLIO
Return to Sender (2011)
Category: Photographic Art
About
Return to Sender
(Part of Love in Absence)
Using the starting point of a scrapbook of postcards received from abroad, ‘Return to Sender’ is a collection of handmade postcards that have traveled around the world following in the footsteps (or air-miles) of their sender, the artist’s Dad.
Reproduced in Archive – each individual pages of the original scrapbook albums made to collect and record the journeys across the world as the artists father worked away on business – the actual location or address their sender made is abstract, superficial landmarks visited by tourists in distant lands. With their photographic content mainly of places, not of people, they reveal little about the sender’s location or well-being. They become a surrogate portrait of the sender, offering an alternative to his likeness albeit a rhetorical record of his journeys.
Created in response to this resource, in 2011 an original set of 112 postcards were sent by the artist around the world trying to connect with the places her father had been. Addressed to locations, landmarks or beings as evidenced in the original correspondence home, only a limited number of the hand-made postcards have returned home.