Jill Sampson

I had forgotten Hertfordshire

I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
2000
25.5 x 77cm
drypoint and collograph
Series of 14 Unique State prints
images scanned from photos by Irena Conomos

I had forgotten Hertfordshire is a series of artworks inspired by a six month love affair that played out predominantly through hand written letters posted between England and Australia. In 1989/90 I lived in the United Kingdom for a year and just before leaving to come home to Queensland Australia, I began a relationship with an Englishman. This love affair developed through months of letter writing between he in England and myself on the family farm in Australia. We planned a five week adventure together when he visited Australia in the months of August/September. The final artwork in the series is an acknowledgement of the end of the relationship, but not of the pain.

I approached this body of work by taking selected extracts from his letters, that tell the story of how this unfolded. For each letter I made small sculptural pieces with collected objects and materials found on the farm, where I had been living at the time when I received the letters. I also made a collograph for each of the selected written extracts. The collographs are the static plate, representative of the letters that carried our words across the globe, while the drypoints document something of my emotional responses – the hope, excitement, discovery, longing, loss and pain.

Two of these artworks were finalists in the 2002 Fishers Ghost Award Exhibition, Campbelltown City Art Gallery.

exhibited at:
Handwriting – an exhibition of work by Jill Sampson and Elizabeth Pozega
A-Space on Cleveland, Surrey Hills, Sydney, NSW
4 – 21 September 2002