Reflections on Strangers on a Train: Kruse What excited me about this project was that it addressed issues and concerns relevant to both my practice and to my experience of being "an artist." The deep thread running through the project has been the issue of identity. What determines who you are and how you are perceived? Is identity a surface thing and can we successfully play with and interchange our identities? With regards to the work I submitted to the project, I used these concerns with identity in quite a straightforward way. Much of my practice is concerned with using fabric and clothing as substitutes for the live body, exploring the history of the body and experience in the traces of wear left in clothing; deconstructing garments to explore the hidden, the archaeology of the costume. The work submitted to "Strangers," which is untitled, consists of two "gendered" and worn garments. It has the potential for these areas to be explored by the contributing artist and, with the addition of various other artefacts, plays with notions of violence, death and gender identities. What is particularly exciting for me though is the shared element of artistic practice that the project explores. As a recently graduated artist, I am very much trying to find my feet and my identity in the contemporary art world. Even though I am living in the city where I attended college (York) I am struggling to network with other artists and makers. I was drawn to the idea that Discotheque was making this journey of communication with its sister collective, Disco, and that strung out along the line of the journeying are these isolated artists invited to become, for a short time, part of that pilgrimage. I have this vision of us all, waiting for the train to arrive and take our work away to the unknown, whilst we receive an unknown in the form of another artist's work. I imagine how I will feel as the train whips out of the station and I am left behind in the darkness. I think about the artists on the train, their communion and communication in the brightly lit train, the unknown conversations, meetings, experiences that they will have. I think about how a part of me, in the form of my work, will be taking part in that adventure. I wonder how much my work will communicate that adventure to me when I receive it back, how much will the identity of the other artist communicate through the work. Will I feel less isolated by the experience? Will my identity as an artist be affected in any way? These concerns are of deep importance I feel for twenty-first century artists. We have to constantly challenge ourselves in our exploration of what it is to be an artist, particularly as so many of us expect to make a living not selling artworks but by taking part in community events, residencies and workshops. The eternal question of who we are making work for, is still a deeply powerful one and perhaps a constantly shifting one. Who do we become when we are wearing the guise of artist and workshop leader? Who are we when we are attending an opening of our work? Who do we become when we are trying to explain what we do to our ageing relatives who consider an artist like Emin to be spawn of the devil? Are we different when we are with other artists? With "Strangers on a Train" in the first instance we are communicating artist to artist. Will another artist get what it is I am trying to do? Is this a safe space? Finally, I am excited about the prospect of interacting with the work of another artist. Giving your work over to another person to work on is somehow an incredibly intimate act. Am I going to "kill" their work? Am I going to be baffled by it? When the moment comes can I perform? Do I have anything to say? How will the process affect me? Will my working practice be challenged? Can there be communication between us or will I once again be left in the dark, a stranger looking in through the lighted window unable to join in? [Kruse's work was altered by Phil Marsden, and Kruse altered Kate Donovan's piece.]