My Life
For a few years my wife commuted by train from Bristol to Nailsea for work. It was only about a 10 minute commute, but became a constant in her life. Over the space of a few years she got through hundreds of train tickets. This was my first experiment with train tickets. I had been reading about people forming cubes from business cards for a while. They tended to make geometric shapes. I felt text art was the natural medium. There is a problem though. A lot of tickets are required. This piece is make of 37 cubes, 142 tickets. There is a trade-off in the resolution of the font. A fine resolution would require more tickets and result in a bigger piece. A low resolution and the characters may not be readable. There are plenty of websites from which pixel fonts can be downloaded, but it is if the viewer expects it to be a coarse resolution font, how readable do they need it to be.
LOVE
My second piece with train ticket. Things changed in life. My wife took a job in London. We would ferry back and forth by train. I dare say, that without the railways, it would have been hard to have maintained a long distance relationship between Bristol and London. Trains allowed us to continuing loving one another. In honour I created my own interpretation of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture. I do indeed love the UK rail network. It is not great, but without it our relationship could well have fallen apart.
US
This was created two years after the LOVE sculpture. Our relationship went from strength to strength, but we are still reliant on trains. They are and will always be a big part of our lives.
Wedding Installation
After six and a half years of being just partners, we got married. Of course train tickets would play a part, so I produced this piece which took pride of place at the wedding venue. The theme of train tickets manifested itself in other aspects of the wedding, but this was clearly on display behind us. It is now hangs in my wife's office.
