This exhibition was developed from postgraduate study at Winchester School of Art, and funded by Southampton Institute of Higher Education and Denbighshire County Council. The starting point for this project was a trio of postcards sent to my paternal grandmother. The three postcards pictured the same subject – Rhyl Botanical Gardens – and each was, seemingly, the same view but taken at different points in time during the 1960s. 

The exhibition was comprised of twenty digital photomontages that overlapped postcards of Rhyl and were sequenced in relation to text from a guidebook for North Wales. There were a number of links between one postcard image and the next in the sequence, taking the viewer through the series. The photomontages were accompanied by display cabinets that included family photographs and postcards; these were arranged by Julia García Hernández. 

Directly onto the wall I drew a street map of Rhyl taken from a North Wales guidebook, replacing a number of street names with the names of members of my family. Also included in this show was a DVD piece of my mother, Agnes Clarke, explaining how my family came to have holidays in North Wales; and nine prints that superimposed tracings of family snapshots over the message and address section of a postcard. These components were developed in further exhibitions. A variation of Postcards from Rhyl was shown at Oriel Colwyn as Shifting Sands.

Postcards from Rhyl
9 September–14 October 2006 
Rhyl Arts Centre, North Wales

Shifting Sands 
22 December 2012–14 March 2013
Oriel Colwyn, Colywn Bay, North Wales