The first of Firrell’s graphic works created for public space was a series of 14 postcards, 148mm x 104mm, printed on various stocks. 13 texts are presented where most postcards more usually show a picture, and one postcard carries a photographic image - of the artist cartwheeling on the Pont des Arts, Paris France
(see 1998.1).
The photograph was taken on 4 April 1998, the artist's 35th birthday, by Russian pianist Yekaterina Lebedeva using a 35mm b&w disposable camera.
'It struck me that 35 was half way towards the biblical three-score-and ten and a cartwheel seemed an appropriately pivotal action to mark the occasion.'
The postcard texts, presented on the 'picture' face of each card, were intended to take on a public life of their own as they passed through the postal system.
Once they reached the recipient, a card might be displayed on a mantelpiece or similar and in this way it would have a second ‘public presence’ in the domestic sphere.
Firrell recalls, 'I was too excited to sleep; this was my breakthrough. The texts would be available to everyone and anyone associated with the postal service - postmen and sorters - before arriving with the recipient who might then go on to display one or more of the texts in their home. This is what did, in fact, happen.'
Considered collectively, the postcards explore the possibility of being more deeply implicated in the lives of others or as the artist put it, 'I wanted to ask if it were possible to operate at a level deeper than friendship alone, to find interactions that challenged the conventions of mere sociability and offered new depths of value and meaning.'
The text of postcard 10
(1998.2).
describes the evocative nature of the paper detritus of everyday life - things like restaurant bills and dry-cleaning tickets - items that unintentionally constitute a biography-in-litter of the lives we have lived:
Aimless afternoons, glasses of kir, early dusk, remembered sentences, telephone calls, cloakroom tickets, restaurant bills and train tickets, telephone messages, folded receipts. And the sudden victory, the sudden opening out of feeling.
Postcard 12
(1998.2a)
evokes the power of a photograph to revivify a moment in time:
Memory like an unsteady film of yourselves in Paris, smoke, laughter, drinking, selfconscious. Those pictures of yourselves outside the Palais Garnier when it was raining and you were selfconscious, so obviously selfconscious.
The artist explained: ‘In Paris, we had our photograph taken on the steps of the old Opera Garnier - a ludicrously over-priced polaroid picture was presented to us stuck into a thin card folder with a crude illustration of the Eiffel Tower on the front. The photographer-of-tourists made us uncomfortable for some reason and the poor quality of the polaroid taken in low light made the picture seem awkward, lost, a fragment from another time. I loved this quality and wanted to evoke the feeling in the postcard text.'
