News from Home is a collaboration between visual artist and sociologist Luke Conroy (Australia) and documentary filmmaker and visual artist Anne Fehres (The Netherlands). The core aim of ‘News From Home’ is to engage with the people, objects and stories which make up a local community and communicate these through visual art pieces.

These art pieces take the form of digital montages. Each of these montages contains between 2 and 200 individual ‘layers’ which are sourced from the thousands of photographs captured by the artists, alongside archival images sourced from the community in which the project is undertaken.

The starting point for News From Home is the humble postcard. The artists are interested in how the postcard presents highly constructed and idyllic images of a place, yet at the same time fails to acknowledge the more authentic but messy reality of that place. The constructed images of the postcard promote a particular ‘tourist gaze’ of a location, whereby the those who visit a place only seek out to confirm the stylised images and experiences seen in postcards, rather than question them or consider a place on a deeper level. It is this ‘deeper level’ consideration that lays at the heart of this project.

During our stay at the SIM Residency in November 2019, we began the sixth edition of this project. Throughout this month we researched a variety of stories and captured thousands of photos which were used to experiment with a various of montage designs - both still and moving.