Holiday: postcards from a remembered seaside

Holiday returns to the British seaside as a remembered pleasure-world of deckchairs, painted signs, striped windbreaks, fairground rides, sun-kissed skin, melting ice cream, sandy sandwiches, and objects left behind at the end of the day. The project is not tied to a named resort or a documented place. Instead, it treats the seaside as memory often treats it: partial, compressed, affectionate, unreliable, and oddly vivid. These are postcards from somewhere that may never have existed exactly as shown, but which still feels familiar. The colours are warm, faded and slightly wrong, as though sunlight, cheap printing, salt air and time have all had a hand in making them. The message on the back says: "Wishing you were here."

The postcard became the project's organising fiction. Each image is presented as a small printed souvenir from a remembered coast: a picture sent back from the past, or perhaps from a dream misremembering the past. The scenes move between fairground pleasure, public bodily atmosphere and human traces: a roller coaster, a candy floss stall, a kiosk queue, abandoned chips, empty deckchairs, beach huts, flip-flops, picnics, towels and suntan lotion. People appear only as adults, often cropped or partly seen. The project avoids childhood illustration while still circling the memory of childhood holidays. What remains is not innocence, but texture: heat, appetite, embarrassment, boredom, delight, tackiness and the peculiar seriousness of having nothing much to do when the weather is warm and sticky.

The images were created through a conversation-to-image process using ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking and Images 2.0 by OpenAI. Unlike conventional text-to-image prompting with an image model such as Flux, the series developed through dialogue: tests, corrections, regenerations, refinements and small acts of visual negotiation. Text rendering was especially accurate and precise. Objects were adjusted or replaced, awkward anatomy repaired, and repeated motifs reduced so that each postcard could hold its own place in the sequence. This unfolding process became part of the work. Holiday is not a reconstruction of the seaside, but a synthetic act of remembering: a machine-assisted return to lazy days, leisure, comedy and colour, where time wasted becomes the very thing preserved.