The Totem Pole - Virginia Water - Windsor Great Park
2010, Audio Cassette Tape, 90mins

Ongoing Sound Art Project - Cassette postcards

In this digital age letters have been replaced by emails, postcards almost replaced by social media. Gemma not only wanted to subvert the postcard on this artwork but also celebrate it. Finding parallels with cassette tapes (both having two sides, being methods of recording and being seen now as an old fashioned and redundant technology) Gemma created and continues to create a series of sound postcards.

The sound postcard is created by recording one side with the ambient sounds of a tourist site while remaining stationary and the other with what would be the text on the reverse of the postcard. The text is created using a text to speech editor and forms a robotic and unemotional feel.

Finding a use for cassettes, a medium that is no longer sold in shops as music and not easy to find blank, and through recreating the postcard in a new (yet old) format Gemma celebrates both mediums. The postcard is subverted by removing the vital visual imagery and requires the viewer to imagine what the place is like purely through sound and the description you would get on the reverse of a normal postcard.

The unemotional tone of the text and by having to listen to the "postcard" out loud we are also reminded that while postcards are directed to us personally they can be easily read by anyone.

Related blog entries

Project with We Found Art

In 2011 Gemma made contact with Katie Smith a Creative Learning Consultant based in Lincolnshire who was looking at the ways in which discarded objects can be seen to have value and beauty. Gemma was intrigued by this as someone who does often find beauty in the objects people discard or lose, especially interested in the story behind the loss.

It also resonated within her practice, postcards are memento's of a journey and unlike some objects may even make explicit their story. They are open to all to read and are as likely as any other letter of becoming lost in the post. Gemma and Katie decided to test to see if postcards intentionally left places and not posted were picked up and sent by well meaning stangers.

Between them they sent postcards to each other leaving them in public places where people were likely to come across them. Of the postcards sent the majority found their way to their intended destination.

Postcards from Beyond the Edge

In 2012 ReOrsa, the Bracknell based artists collective, invited proposals for an exhibition titled Boundaries and Beyond, looking at the concepts of boundaries and of breaking them.

Gemma proposed a series of postcards created to look like they had been bought and sent from places that were currently at the borders of human exploration, or even beyond them. Deep jungles, deserts and even the depths of space and the deepset oceans became tourist hotspots with familiar touristic language and the inevitable Wish you were here.

The series forms a collection of 60 postcards sent between two people, although we only ever hear one side, over a span of 11 years from the turn of the century to early 2012. Stamps and postmarks were created to try to cement the fantasy and hopefully give people a momentry pause that it might be true.