Quest

18:00 – 20:00 7th – 10th March 2019 Public GH024 Royal College of Art White City London W12 7TU

Exploring the power of travel and illustration as a way to understand memory, emotional connection, chance and serendipity. Presenting Wild Collage by Emily Evans and Only Yourself to Fall Out With by Tom Gooch.

Wild Collage by Emily Evans is a project inspired by the walking tours of George Borrow and the writing of W.G Sebald . Emily travelled north along the Norfolk coastal path using a mixture of ritualistic walking and ‘Coast Hopper’ buses. Equipped with a utility apron and pulling a trolly full of materials, her lone walk explored memory, and the ritual of walking and in-situ collage as a way to explore grief.

Only Yourself to Fall Out With by Tom Gooch is a project about his claustrophobia regarding train travel and anxiety about decision making. Throwing himself in at the deep end, Tom travelled Europe for a month on an interrail ticket, making last minute decisions about where to go by flipping a coin and embarking on often long train journeys every two days. Completely shutting himself off from his friends and parents back home, Tom used his sketchbook as his only companion to document his thoughts, anxieties and emotional response to travelling in such a way. The book itself is an artefact of everyone he met, everything he did and everything he thought, meticulously documented through drawing and writing. The work shown in Quest is a representation of the often obsessive nature of Tom’s work, in reaction to the self-imposed stress and anxiety of the otherwise once-in-a-lifetime trip.

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These projects have been supported by the Gordon Peter Pickard bursaries, intended for travel used to inform drawings relating to an area of research of particular interest to each applicant. The next call for interest in this drawing and travel bursary will be sent out in early May 2019.