My images are constructed by arranging found objects and readymade illustrations on objects to construct psychological, social or environmental narratives. 

I often wonder how we experience the images printed on mass produced items such as souvenirs. I wonder if it is possible to actually have an experience of a beach on the side of a teacup or the view from a lookout on the bottom of a breakfast bowl.

The impulse for my work with souvenirs came from imagining the gap between the stereotyped ideal of a place versus the reality of lived-experience. I am interested in the increasing attempt to mediate, pre-package and commodify lived-experience, and in how souvenirs exist as material proof of having consumed a desirable iconic experience as marketed by the tourist industry.

These works form part of a body of work  that I was commissioned to make as part of the exhibition  Fibro Coast  with the souvenir collection of the Gold Coast City Gallery. However, it soon became clear that some of the antique souvenirs from the Gold Coast had a very different cultural meaning and purpose from the kind of mass-produced souvenirs made in China that we purchase today.

Most of the antique souvenirs from the 1920’s and 30’s were  silver-gelatin hand-coloured or sepia photos set against the back of glass dishes or trays – as a way to frame, preserve and display the photo. Far from being a kitsch or superfluous object, these glass dishes may have been the only photo or image a family or couple had as a record of their holiday. For us today they are more like museum pieces that document aspects of the history of the Gold Coast as a holiday destination.

Rephotographing these photographs has been a process of paying homage, of finding strategies to allow them to be seen in a different way, experienced at a different scale, in a bigger picture and/or imagined narrative. I have tried to emphasize the idiosyncratic palettes used in hand colouring the photos and to continue these colours in the abstract patterns of the surrounding glass and narrative scenes. I have used recycled materials at hand such as paper, cloth, plastic bags, cardboard as well as other ‘found’ readymade objects, such as glassware, plastics, miniatures and toys to suggest aspects of the social and architectural evolution of the Gold Coast as a growing community and holiday destination. I have also drawn on memories of my own childhood family holidays in Fibro houses on beaches and estuaries.

Elaine Campaner 2014