It’s been awhile since my last post, although this is more from being extremely busy rather than having nothing to blog about! Anyway, here is a little something I’ve been working on.
I visited the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill recently, which lucky for me is just down the road, and was intrigued by their current exhibition of postcards by Roy Voss, which presents a series of postcards as a sequence. He selects one word from the back of the card and turns it around to fit it into the picture on the front. The result is a series of narratives, built through sequence and juxtaposition, that relate both to the context of the individual card and to it’s neighbours.
This got me thinking as I’m always interested in new narrative contexts and like many artists I’m an enthusiastic collector of ‘stuff’, which includes old postcards. I have a small collection that includes notes on the back from the 1940’s, 50’s and into the early 60’s, recording visits made by an unknown person and their family to a variety of British locations. They simply say: ‘I visited, 13/8/58’ or ‘All 3 of us visited here 9/8/67’, in the same cursive pencil handwriting.
My response, inspired by Voss, was to turn these postcards inside out and to bring the records to the front by tracing the text and embroidering into onto the front of the card. I’ve selected embroidery because it is favoured method of mine that enables me to explore the material and it’s context in a physical way. After embroidering a few of these cards the hand writing has become familiar to me and although the author remains a stranger whom I could not hope to trace, I hope in some small way to have brought these memories back to life.
Here are a few postcards and work in progress: 
Vanessa Marr 