The second exhibition about my family’s holidays in North Wales during the 1960s – Visitors to Llandudno – was designed specifically for the rotunda space at Llandudno Library. I produced ten photomontages that fitted around the walls of the rotunda: five in colour and five in black & white. 

The narrative for the show was the stories of two men: my maternal grandfather John Gelico Smith, and my partner’s father Urcino García Hernández. The underlying idea was that our two families were united by the coincidence that these two men could have been in the holiday resort at the same time in 1966, and that could have met or, at least, walked past each other. One man was in Llandudno on holiday whilst the other was there working in the holiday industry. 

The five colour images were composed from postcards of Tenerife in the Canary Islands where my father-in-law had grown up, and from postcards of Llandudno, which is where he lived and worked when he first came to the UK. Arranged as a sequence as the viewer moves from the first image to the last, the subject changes from an image entirely referencing Tenerife, to an image comprised solely of the features of Llandudno. 

A similar pattern is repeated with the black & white photomontages. These images combine postcards with family snapshots. A digitally reproduced text that was handwritten text by my mother, Agnes Clarke, describing my family’s holidays in North Wales is overlaid on the image, whilst a printed text that runs along the bottom of the picture recalls Cino’s story. The pictures were accompanied by two display cabinets, arranged by Julia García Hernández, that had objects and images relating to my grandfather and father-in-law. 

This exhibition toured to Ruthin library.

Visitors to Llandudno
7 July– 8 August 2007
Llandudno Library Gallery, Conway County, North Wales 

Visitors to Llandudno
1–29 September 2007
Ruthin Library Gallery, Denbighshire, North Wales