Winter Memory Postcards

Can one truly capture the spirit of Christmas with an iPhone 15? Anyone who has spent an indecent amount of time labouring over the perfect Instagram photo dump will surely draw the same conclusion: the most wonderful time of the year stubbornly refuses to be reduced to a 20-slide carousel.

So how else might we share the delights of our Winter Wonderland with those near and dear to us? Cast your mind back to a time when we put pen to postcard and trusted our messages to travel halfway around the world. These small, often smudged, slow-moving – courtesy of Royal Mail – mementos once carried far more than just an image. Yet today, they’ve fallen into disuse, replaced by instant uploads and double-taps.

The ‘Winter Memories’ exhibition makes a case for the postcard – a form not quite obsolete, but certainly severely underused. The event brings together the work of fifteen artists, curated by Layla Montague and Lisa Lavrova in collaboration with the St Andrews Heritage Museum. The works explore the postcard as a humble and intimate form of communication. Across the exhibition, artists work in a wide range of mediums, from film photography to paint on canvas, to depict their individual winter memories. Through different mediums, the pieces are united by a shared sensitivity to memory and place.

The postcard form is elevated through well-informed artistic references by current students. There were echoes of Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’ in Sandra Palazuelos Garcia’s ‘Winter Dreaming, Dreaming Winter’, the graphic clarity of Hockney’s lino cuts is reflected in Sky Maher’s ‘Standish Woods’, and resonances of Leichtenstein’s Pop Art surface in Francesca Jeffs’ ‘Reflections.’ Some works closely resembled postcards, while others departed from the form entirely, but all captured the essence of winter.

The work from current students entered into conversation with photographs taken from the St Andrews Heritage Museum archives. Dating back as far as 1925, these images depicted familiar landmarks — the Swilcan Bridge, the Cathedral ruins, and the harbour — all under settled snow. They also captured St Andrews not only as a postcard-perfect town, but as a wonderful community coming together in Winter to partake in curling, ice-skating, and Hogmanay traditions such as ‘Cake Day,’ where children would receive free cake from local bakeries.

The exhibition extends beyond the visual too, drawing on olfactory memory to achieve a fully immersive experience. With eyes closed, one might think they had wandered into the White Company on Market Street in December, as a series of jars containing notes of vanilla, ginger, clove, cinnamon, and peppermint were placed around the room. This nod to the Proust Phenomenon, where smell becomes a direct pathway to lived experience, allowed visitors to relive their winter recollections. These scents served to categorise the artwork, as artists were encouraged to connect their work with a certain fragrance.

Winter may seem everlasting in St Andrews, but don’t let its beauty slip by unnoticed. You may find yourself tempted to snap a picture and send it to family or friends – or better yet, to write a postcard, and write yourself into the history of St Andrews too.

Photo: St Andrews Heritage Museum