When I started the 5-minute collage experiment, I was inspired to create a bunch of mail art and to send it to some family and friends. Up to now, I had only been responding to calls for mail art exhibitions and to calls from individuals with personal projects.
I thought it’d be fun to send mail art to people you see in your life and also I was thinking how neat it would be to send mail art instead of Christmas cards–after all, I don’t celebrate Christmas. Sending mail art to someone you see in person is interesting because it adds a new way of communicating. I prefer communicating with small works of art and a bit of text rather than writing letters.
So, here is what I sent out recently…not postcards but cards with the front and back decorated and slipped into an envelope. With some, I made the envelopes myself. You can easily find envelope templates online. For all of these, I used recipe cards from Michaels Recollections brand (sorry, I can’t find the exact product online). I like the tab that sticks out of the cards.
In this card, I used a ticket that my friend had received when visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She had sent me her ticket to use in my work, so I thought mail art was a great place for it. I like how I incorporated the words ‘new beginning,’ (something I had lying around) given the time of the year.
The image of the man in the card above is from a Camilla Engman calendar from a few years back. I’ve been saving the calendar because I like Camilla’s work but working with her images is more inspiring than keeping them hidden and forgotten. I’m not selling this work, so I feel OK to play with another artist’s image.
Again, the image of the woman above is from a Camilla Engman calendar. I really like how this card turned out. I used Italian here–a sentence cut out from a book, and some fabric (the flower shape)…
I think of the person I am making the card for and things emerge that feel right.
When someone’s work is an inspiration, it can be useful to think what about it inspires you. As I was working with Camilla’s images, I realized I like her simple line drawings and it occurred to me that I ought to try draw a few figures in her style and see what comes out. This might be a theme for 5-minute collages for one week.
