Reflections on Strangers on a Train: Jacqueline Mantle The project initially caught my attention because I love the physical experience of travelling by train; the clank and sway as you rush along gathering momentum, forging progress, literally making tracks whilst your perception of the unfolding landscape constantly changes. As it turned out, the concern here was within the train rather than the view from aboard but I liked the concept of exchanging works and the themes Hitchcock explored. I was interested in identity; as strangers, our fellow passengers' identites are constructed in our minds by their appearance and personal belongings, which can be telling. My piece was a handbag containing personal belongings each collected from a different person, one exchange of sorts having already taken place to construct apparent evidence of another passenger's presence on the train. However the problems in actually getting to York to exchange works (due to another train delay) tested even my enamouration with train travel! Thanks to someone's bright idea of leaving my work with one of the other York artists, Anna Pharoah, and announcing my name by Tannoy, I was able to retrieve the work and post my bag to Ray White the following day. In fact, I found the conversation between artists facilitated by the drama positive; obviously, the dialogue of the project took place in the adding to and amending of each other's work but in practice I found this curious. Handing over works, we received the potential to destroy them but I had a desire to ''get'' the work and respond accordingly. The shoebox of souvenirs and artefacts I received was suggestive and contradictory, each object seeming to refute the origins implicated by the one before. In the end I decided the owner(s) had hung onto them for far too long and tried to bury their associations. My own work had been altered in a way that I hoped for but also that I had predicted, the contents of the bag exchanged for personal items that were very similar yet of a clearly different identity. [Jacqueline's work was altered by Ray White, and Jacqueline altered Mandy Bray's piece.]