Hints for British Tourists

Hints for British Tourists is the re-staging and fictional expansion of a found pamphlet containing instructions for travel. Presented as photographic documentation the work is a meditation on travel, tourism, time and memory.

The work is the re-staging and fictional expansion of a found pamphlet containing instructions for travel staged through a series of site-based interventions of a fictitious character attempting to self-actualise the perfect holiday by way of instruction. The documentation records this failure. The work seeks to engage with concepts of place, landscape, memory and identity through the quintessential image of the UK and often the first holiday, the seaside. The work makes enquiries both serious and humorous as we grapple with what it means to be a tourist in post-Brexit England (the grass wasn't greener), post pandemic and in the midst of climate catastrophe a return to more innocent times seems both impossible and futile. Dream holidays make promises to transform the traveller, to delight, to entertain but as I write the world is burning. The work is the attempt to return and restore the traveller to a happier reality which is thwarted through the passage of time and world events. The titles selected Rock Bottom, Between a Rock and a Hard Place & Rush Hour – also point toward emotional states of being in motion, of waiting, of failure, conflict, indecision or, indeed, indicate a sense of stillness.