Gathering Postcards is a way to map the interstitial across decades and continents. This research is concerned with exploring Bachelard's Poetics of Reverie, which invites me to be very still while exploring ideas and impulses, as well as his Poetics of Space, and my sense of the world as a sort of psychic architecture to move through. It is informed by poetry and memoir, and their methods - primarily the rhythmic ways ideas or memories evolve and reveal themselves. The idea of procession is addressed beautifully in two books influential to this project. Frédéric Gros's A Philosophy of Walking and Tom Nicholson's Comparative Monument speak to the process of procession through walking and its spiritual implications.
There is an element of autoethnography; this is my family’s history. My ancestors left home and lovers too, no doubt. Perhaps my great grandfather’s wistful daydreamed woman went somewhere else when the violence or the famine came and became someone else’s great grandmother. Friends, homes, lovers, families torn apart. Yet not everybody fled. Did it take a grain of the wanderlusting adventurer’s gene my family seems to have selected for? And where to next?
In my story, lovers travel separately but write longingly c/o acquaintances on other continents. They will go on to begin other families and then leave them.
Once all the postcards are gathered, Gathering Postcards: Invitation is printed on double-wide advertising posters and installed on Easter weekend under bridges and along the Yarra River, where they hang for one week before becoming part of the accretion of images that form the walls of cities. My search for these posters is a treasure hunt, performative despite its privacy. There could have been an opening, an artist talk, a celebration under a bridge, but this walk is solitary. A new map is drawn; the map of the art-seeker. Looking for the elements of this dispersed installation excites me just as much as it would if I were following a Biennale map.
Each image is so close to the Yarra that it serves almost as a window into another dimension where the world is black and white and every detail is consequential. In the photographs of the installation, the world rushes past, with so many feet and motors, while the river sits quietly waiting.
This is a sacred portal, just as the steps leading into the river are a sacred invitation.
