Book Launch: “Patricia Townsend and Gina Glover - Bridging Time 1944-2024: Letters to my father”.

Patricia Townsend will be in conversation with Gina Glover about the process of creating her new book of photographs and sonnets ‘Bridging Time 1944-2044: Letters to my father’.

She writes: ‘My father, Sam Townsend, served with the Royal Engineers during the closing months of World War 2, writing letters home to his parents every few days. After the war he never spoke of his experiences and I didn’t know his letters existed until, shortly before his death, he gave them to me. Although he couldn’t disclose where he was when he wrote each letter, I was amazed by his vivid descriptions of what he saw and felt.

In this book, I reply, 80 years later, to my father’s letters.  My letters to him are in the form of sonnets, each responding to, and quoting from, a particular letter from him to my grandparents. The book is richly illustrated with photographs, many taken on a journey I made in 2024, following my father’s war route through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Some of these are montaged with wartime photographs. Other photos are from my father’s own album. The book is my attempt to understand my father’s experiences, how they affected him and how they may have indirectly impacted my own childhood.’

Patricia Townsend is an artist working with photography, moving image, installation and poetry. She has been working in photography for 40 years. Before the days of digital photography and Photoshop, she produced montaged black and white images in the darkroom. Many of these were made at the Photo Co-op (the first incarnation of Photofusion). After gaining an MA at the London College of Printing, Patricia began making moving image works and these have been shown widely in gallery exhibitions and film screenings. Her looped film ‘Inner Worlds 1’ was shortlisted for the Ruskin Prize and the Aesthetica Prize 2024 and has been acquired by the British Academy. Patricia has a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art and is author of the book ‘Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process’ (Routledge 2019).

Gina Glover is an interdisciplinary artist working in collaboration with the natural and human-made environment through photography and sculpture. She co-founded Photo Co-Op in 1979 in Wandsworth, which in 1991 became Photofusion. She is a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal and the Medical Research Council’s Visions of Science Award (twice). Her receipt of Wellcome Foundation funding, with Cambridge University, led to her project Life in Glass, employing the scientific IVF photography of the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Professor Sir Robert Edwards.