Slide with side text

Kilgallen attaches great importance to letters and signs, and she was fascinated by how you could communicate with people you had never seen through art and text. Her work often refers to hobos: homeless workers who travelled the country illegally on goods trains. They left messages on the trains in a secret language, to keep one another informed of news, job opportunities and each other’s ups and downs. According to Kilgallen, it was mankind’s primal, intrinsic desire to leave behind something tangible for others. She therefore gave hundreds of trains a tag – a signature of her pseudonym: Matokie Slaughter.