Description:

‘List: Date Unknown’ explores the space between the neatness of an archive and the messiness of a personal collection through collating, archiving and indexing objects and family memories from personal history.

The work takes ephemera including old letters, postcards, and photographs all with some degree of privacy, and shows how a different treatment of them affects the reading of the object and opens up space to the meanings they hold. ‘List: Date Unknown’ explores connecting memories and history to knowledge and material matter, connections within the content between family members, and connecting to the audience as reminder of one’s own history and past and one’s own culture and heritage.

The work touches on the idea of public versus private. I wanted to explore the impact of taking an object created for a fleeting moment in time, given as a personal object and turn it into a piece to be viewed publicly. Dealing with personal history and belongings brought up issues of privacy that exist around memories, intimate familial conversations and complex family histories. In considering the importance of how we deal with content like this, I brought the idea of redaction into the book. The work holds space for what can be shared publicly, what can be translated for the audience, and what can left without context.

I was interested in the spaces of analogue and digital, and how we both communicate and collect differently across past and present in these spaces. The typefaces throughout the book are chosen with this is mind, and are intended to draw links back to printed types featured in the postcards, the different handwritings features in the material, and the theme of indexing. The material I was collating is very physical in nature – postcards, mailed letters, photographs in old photo albums – and yet I received half of them online in digital form from across the world. I wanted to keep a sense of physicality while contrasting between the digital and analogue, and allow the viewer to consider those worlds, highlighting the differences in how we now communicate, as well as the aesthetic differences from the age of snail mail to the computer screen.