You Are the Journey: North Staffordshire

Using texts, ticket advertising space, cold calling interviews, video footage by film maker Bejhat Omer Abdulla, digital sound recordings and posters Claire Barber is beginning to build a local archive of responses that explore the richness of human diversity and individual perception of a bus journey in the Stoke-on-Trent area.

The texts received back will be arranged into a new sequence and printed onto the back of future bus tickets. Working with over 360 000 tickets and using the latest technology in thermal heat sensitive inks, the text will be typed onto the thin paper of the bus ticket and read by the warmth from a passengers hand. In this way a series of contemporary social portraits of the unique community that travel by bus in the North Staffordshire region will be subtly revealed.

About the artist
Claire’s work has taken her all over the world during residencies in Japan, Bosnia, Italy, Bratislava and Australia, working with both vast tracks of land and small groups of individuals.

She is essentially a site specific artist; however, Claire has extended her practice to encompass performance, textiles, drawing, installation, sound, photography and books to reflect the shifting patterns of her research.

The first batch of 367,000 tickets were released on 8th December 2008 from the Hanley depot. By posing questions on each ticket passengers were enticed to text in responses to their journey.