You Are the Journey (an embroidered intervention)

My practice often takes local communities as its starting point. For ‘You Are the Journey (an embroidered intervention)’ I revisited an earlier collaborative project with RA Webb which placed questions and space for hand written responses by commuters on the front of the Hythe Ferry Ten Journey ticket used by passengers commuting between Hythe and the city of Southampton on southern coast of England. Subsequent batches of tickets printed the commuters’ responses in the same area that the multi-use tickets received punch holes to indicate a journey. Revisiting the appropriated and fully functional tickets used in the project, I needle wove into the paper tickets with remnant threads of my daily wardrobe of clothes. The curator Linda Brassington (2015) has provided her personal reflections of my piece, stating that: ‘The work is presented in a gallery context for the first time, open to new meaning and reinterpretation. Here it becomes an expression of repetitive production and recurring memory.’ It appeared that I had created a new kind of artwork, which had more to do with ‘You Are the Journey’ in the past than in the present. The initial structure of the artwork reflected the rhythms of the seasons and ebb and flow of commuters crossing Southampton Water each day. Multiple elements (ferry tickets) captured the experiences of individual travelers, and now they captured my experiences using a sequence of intimate darning’s over each ticket.