Edition of 12 digitally printed postcards with handwritten text on reverse.
The text and image series documents my changing verbal and visceral relationship with my late sister following her initial cancer diagnosis. The postcards fold the private into the public, intimacy into distance, and presence into absence. Cliches and phrases frequently repeated in conversations with my sister during her first months of treatment are inscribed on my body, which materialises an unstable typography through shifting gestures and poses. The handwritten texts on the reverse of the postcards summarise these intimate conversations and address my unspoken responses to my sister. Mobilising Susan Sontag’s proposition in Regarding the Pain of Others: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” (8), Postcards to my Sister bears witness to the displacements between “I” and “you” in the work of empathy.
Hazel McMichael 