With inspiration gained from studying artists who use baggage (with contents) as a device, the final outcome is starting to take shape. I have decided that suitcases and clothing provide a perfect complement for the postcards. What I’m interested in is how different configurations of clothing and spilling out from the cases affects the narrative wrapped around the postcards themselves.
I have used existing shredded clothing below and scattered it in and around a single case. The shredded clothing embeds a level of violence but the coils could be DNA or even streams of dialogue. The contrast between the mess of cloth and the neat postcards looks intentional and confident. I see an explosion of historical emotion in the clothing but the postcards hold language that has neatly stayed in tact. Maybe the language has persisted but everything around it has morphed into something new. How does this then impact the original words that were uttered?
What I question about this arrangement is how three cases would look together. Do I need to differentiate between them in terms of how the clothing is arranged? If each case contains multiples of a single postcard, what if the colour of the clothing reflected the colour of the dominant clothing the model is wearing? So we would have torn white, red and brown clothing. This is certainly something to experiment with as it would look more resolved in some ways – colour contains emotion in itself so this separation would include this as a device.
Below I tore up the postcards to see how that would change the narrative. My immediate impression is that now everything is broken – the torn postcards in amongst the torn clothes lose their definition, they are lost in the chaos and we cannot read the words and relate them to the visuals. I don’t think this works at all.
Summary & next steps
This is good progress and I think colour separation of clothes is the next step, as well as incorporating the actual printed postcards which have just arrived.