Ghostwriting

In their family archives, the artists discovered a suitcase full of postcards belonging to their Great-grandmother Edith, who grew up in Hull, and moved to South Africa in the 1910s. Her postcards are a testament to an abandoned form of communication and to life-long friendships that continued despite thousands of miles of separation. Is it the action of writing by hand that carries intent, a strength of conviction that invests the words with meaning? Perhaps this is why our ancestors collected postcards, letters and written ephemera so preciously, not just for the words but for the action contained within the words, the physical gesture of scripting. The faintly visible words are traces of the shapes of the letters written over 100 years ago, through tracing the words, we could imagine the motion of the writer's hand try to deduce the sensations they felt, and try to get under their skin. Victorians were great collectors, and amongst our family's hand-me-downs we found pressed flowers and collections of cigarette cards, which must have held value to their owners. Pressed flowers were given as gifts of sentiment, and the plant pressed in this work has delicate heart shaped seed-pods. The Cigarette Cards series are an invented heirloom, playing on great-great-grandmother Anne Filaratoff's now lost collection of cigarette cards. Strangely, a family of migrants are also a family of collectors, perhaps through a need to hold on, to retain some sense of the thread of history.