Nostalgia Key

eight milled aluminum keys with wool pouches, maps and letters on paper, 6” x 10” bubble mailers

2015

We’ve all lost touch with people we love. We grow up. We move away. We do new things. But when memories flood, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to access the past? Nostalgia Key is a thing happening between friends across seas, a small homage to a cherished collective experience — what it means to be together, and then apart, and what remains. 

Important locations of shared experience were scavenged by "walking" the streets of Sydney on Google Earth. Navigation was solely from memory. Exact coordinates were plotted and used to design a key that would point to these locations when placed on a map of Sydney. Eight copies of the nostalgia key travelled across the sea by mail into the hands of eight old friends, to cherish or trash it as they please. However, there remains one place I cannot plot, a place that no longer exists, demolished, the place we never owned, but for which we still have the key, the inspiration for this project...