Travelsick part 2: Out of body
The Travelsick project undertaken by the collective, British Artists Abroad (BAab} and exhibited at Talk- Artists Initiative Inc., was concerned with examining the theme of travel and communication over vast distances, and between artists and audiences. Travelsick Part 2 featured the works of two artists, Kim Merrington and Rebecca Shaw (Part 1 included the works of Kale Wise and Kelly Lange). The exhibition-subtitled Out of Body- examined the theme of flight and travel as a metaphor, amongst other things, for escaping the corporeal.
Taking inspiration from the theme of travel, Kim Merrington's work focused around the heroic persona of Amy Johnson, the female aviator who mysteriously disappeared while flying over the Thames Estuary in 1941 . One wall of the room was horizontally marked by a sequence of laser copies of newspaper articles and images entitled Route Proving. The intimacy of detail created by the deliberate reduction of the scale of articles and images was effective, inviting the spectator to move up close in order to discover the varied facets of Johnson's life. The laser images were hung across the wall horizontally, held in place by bull clips, thus conjuring the impression of an archival environment, a collection of 'evidence' gathered by an enthusiastic a researcher.
Articles from newspapers, such as the Guardian, related Johnson's adventures: her 10,000 mile solo flight from Britain to
Australia in a Gypsy Moth in 1931; her journey through sandstorms where, forced to land in Java, she patched up the wings of her plane with sticking plaster; her ju jitsu training that came in handy when fending off Arab sheikhs; her disappearance in 1941 ; and claims- 50 years later-by an ex-RAF soldier that he