Category Archives: mail art

The day ends in “Fiery Frustration”

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matchbox art

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

—Kurt Vonnegut

fiery frustration: a fabric postcard

Just about ready to hurl my Singer overlocker into the harbor. Spent most of yesterday trying to figure out what was wrong with it…it’s been in storage for 2 years, and pretty much brand new, I hardly used it when I bought it. Now this big fat curtain job has come along, and I desperately need to overlock the pieces because it’s such heavy fabric that hemming would increase the bulk ridiculously.

I opened it up, cleaned and greased all the parts, threaded it…started the generator (bit tricky, you wrap a cable around the flywheel and pull as hard as you can)…tried it, no go…re-threaded it…found that the upper looper piston had seized…un-seized it…threaded it again…started the generator, tried it…not making chain stitches…re-threaded it…cleaned it again…finally got it all spinning and pumping…started the generator…then that accursed, un-seized upper looper swings up just as nice as you please, and snaps both needles into several small pieces and throws the needle plate out of whack.

It was night by this time. I was fuming and near to tears. A whole day gone, and nothing working. Desperate to get something right, I fired up the generator one last time, hauled out my regular sewing machine, and in a swirl of fabric scraps, paper bits and some ribbon, I made a long-overdue fabric postcard for Sharon McGrath. Sharon sent me a beautiful fabric postcard last May, and it was high time I made her one in reply.

I’ve been putting off making this postcard for a month, waiting for that perfect concord of peace, cheer, and stitchiness to strike me…and here all it took was the pent-up murderous energy, some rage against a machine, and the mule’s obstinacy to do something creative before the day was out.

It’s called “Fiery Frustration” and it was glee to sew. It improved my mood compeletely…I loved the colors, the random patches of fabric I tore and stitched down. I loved that I could go to my To Do list that evening and ‘X’ off an item that had been nagging at my conscience for a while.

Comin’ at ya, Shazz! Ahhh….X marks the spot.

fiery frustration: a fabric postcard

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Mail art on the first of May

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We hadn’t paid a visit to our post office box for a few weeks, so I had a real surprise today upon finding, among the invitations to exhibit openings and the bank statements, three beautiful pieces of mail art in it.

Jenni wrote me a long letter about art, language, and her new home in Langkawi, Malaysia. She filled the margins with, and added cut-outs of, her bright drawings: hot-house lilies in brilliant tropical colours, tendrils and curly swashes on her letters.

Shazz sent me a richly embellished fabric postcard. Layers of color and texture play in Shazz’s work, leading the eye around to marvel at little details of stitch or pattern.I savour the way the postage stamp she used—a large stamp featuring Lake Eyre during The Dry—is echoed by the thread play of the fabric card, itself…shades of silvery sand and blue sky veined with clouds, softened by shimmery iridescent threads that look like the heat rising off a desert.

Shazz also sent me an artist’s trading card called Fire…a layer of sandy fabric, cut away to reveal a vivid, intense welt of red fabric underneath, emphasized by bold black machine-stitching, was inspired by the Victoria Bush Fires.

Thanking you both, Jenni and Shazz! It is so nice having creative, talented friends who take the time to send you lovely handmade letters and works of art from all over the world, through the post! I love all three creations intensely (will send e-mails soon!)

Now I have to get offline and get started making my replies! That reminds me, it’s time for another postcard to Jason Moss…

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mail art : : a Mossy postcard and a ‘pinkwork’ letter for a goddess…

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collage and drawing on a postcard for the artist Jason Moss

Among the things revived by the trip to see all my wonderfully creative and artistic friends in Manila was a mutual desire to start up our old practice of making and sending each other beautiful letters through the post. Here are a couple I made over the weekend:

A naughty, oversized postcard (above) featuring parrots and April’s “Flavour of The Month”, for that enfant terrible of the art world, brilliant painter Jason Moss…

For Agnes Arellano, Filipina sculptor of the “sacred and the mythical, the physical and the erotic, the magical and the mundane, the religious and the profane, and music and song”, I made a delicate letter embroidered in blackwork patterns, using pink thread (pinkwork? ;) )

embroidery on paper, a letter for the artist Agnes Arellano

The afternoon I spent with Agnes in her cool, shadowy, compound—where buildings and gardens mingle and intersect like a cross between cathedral and green  house—was a highlight of my trip back to Manila.

Agnes Arellano, Sculptor

Agnes took me on an intimate viewing of the sculptures in her gallery, and I fell in love with her latest cast bronze series, The Goddess Revisited…the gorgeously fecund bodies of these lovely goddess figures and their ardent supplicants were inspired by a trip Agnes took to see the ancient goddess figurines of Malta.

I was inspired, in turn, by their heft and curves, their saucy braids, their unabashed sexuality and celebration of womanhood, and by the delicate little goat feet of the deities.

I had to smile at the name of the series, which I didn’t know until I looked up Agnes’ website later that evening. It could have summed up the day…for, indeed, it felt like I had made a modest pilgrimage—an artistic and spiritual one—to revisit the Friend, this calm and gracous holy woman with a voice like a sacred well deep in the woods, like a clearing where the doe-eyed, goat-footed goddesses of creativity and destruction come to dance, and sing.

Milk Goddess Supplicant 2 in bronze

Mail art. It rocks. So much nicer than a message on facebook, or an e-mail.

Send a letter, get a letter:

Smallest Forest

PO Box 36043

Winnellie, NT 0821

Australia

mail art : : blue vegetation for The Envelope Project

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sketchbook page : rotten vegetation

Went through my doodle notebooks this morning for ideas of what to put on the envelope I’m sending to The Envelope Project, hosted by the blog Meet Me At Mikes. This page of curly vegetation turned me on…I wanted to see these designs done in blue ballpoint pen (or what LOOKED like a ballpoint pen…actually I used 4 shades of Staedtler Triplus Fineliner) on a page of dense text…like the elaborate doodles you might find in a biology textbook.

I put on some music, made a pot of coffee, watered the one pot-plant that we own, and then set to work:

Tore a page out of the oversized Acne Paper, a favourite magazine of mine, produced twice yearly in Sweden. It was an interview with Noam Chomsky about language and culture (these details don’t matter to anyone who will see the envelope later, but they matter to my processes).

I wrote the addresses first, then pencilled-in the vines and curls around them.

Then I sent my mind off to a planet covered in jungles of blue plants, and started to doodle…

Not perfect, but then I don’t put a big premium on perfect. I so enjoyed the doodle part, and it was a great way to spend a weekend at home, on the boat. The finished envelope goes in the post tomorrow!

P.S. Want to do an envelope of your own? Here’s the address, and Pip Lincoln’s button for the project. Off you go!
the envelope project

P.P.S. I’m big on mail art, too, and would love to exchange some awesome postal art with you! Yes, YOU!

Send a Letter, Get A Letter.

send a letter get a letter

the weekend : : some mail art

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In a recent fit of silly subjects I made these two DL-sized postcards: acrylic paints, a black Sharpie, and mixed-media collage on canvas, and then backed with cereal box cardboard.

“Flinging Tea Bags and Sugar Cubes” was sent to my friend, Petal Face, who used to occupy the artist’s studio next door to mine at the DVAA, in the city. She moved back to Melbourne last year and I really miss her, though we only knew each other for about four months. It felt like we’d known each other for ages. She made some amazing illustrations in thread, with her sewing machine, on pre-loved fabrics, and she used to tell such beautiful, honest, open stories. She was funny and graceful and fey, and a lot of other lovely things that I will never be! I wonder if she got the postcard, or if it got lost along the way? I haven’t heard from her yet.

I  think I’ll send the chair postcard—it’s (rather inappropriately) called “Off yo’ ass” because I was telling myself to get up and do something…I painted it over later, but the Sharpie ink kept bleeding through the however-many layers of paint I put over it!—to the Meet Me At Mikes Envelope Project…although I wonder if it isn’t too late, now? I might double check before I make the envelope for it tomorrow.

the envelope project

UPDATE! Yes, Pip Lincoln’s ▲▼▲Envelope Project▲▼▲ is still running, until the 14th of July or thereabouts, so if you fancy adding to the already-very-impressive collection of envelopes and trinkets that she has started putting up in her shop’s display window, GO! Quickly! Make something fabulous!

That reminds to add here that I make and send mail art regularly…if you want to exchange some postal art just send me something:

Send A Letter to Get A Letter…