Greetings to all you fellow mail-artists. I thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself before the storm of activity that is sure to take place after our official start date, and to offer a few words of advice from the perspective of someone who has been doing Mailart 365 for more than half a year.
My name is Kiera Pannell (that is my real name - no nom de plume for me) and I started my own daily mail art project about seven months ago as a way to force myself to maintain my art practice. At the time I was working as a high school math teacher in the wilds of Reading, England, and I was struggling to balance my artistic aspirations with the demands of my job. At the beginning, I didn't set up any rules for myself except that I needed to work on art every day, and mail something (not necessarily the same piece) every day.
At first, I wasn't sure who to mail my work to - the act of mailing it was more about forcing myself not to be precious about what I was creating. I wanted to have a cycle of creating images and giving them to an audience - in essence letting go of any feelings of ownership that I had over them. So, for the first month or so I mailed images to people/institutions that I admired. (This required a fair amount of detective work in finding their addresses) The self-portrait pictured above was mailed to Roger Ebert, I sent a series of images to the cartoonist James Sturm, and even mailed a portrait of Neils Bohr to the physicist/actor/teacher Rupinder Brar.
Over time, I came up with all manners of routines and time-saving devices, because beyond the creation stage, documenting and publicizing my mail art could easily have taken over my entire life.
Survival Tips
- Keep a mail art calendar. I plan out in advance who I will mail work to and on which days. This means that when someone sends me mailart, I automatically enter their address into the next free spot on the calender, assuring that I will send them something in return. This keeps people from falling through the cracks (mostly) and it also means that if I go off searching for mail art addresses on the net, I have a place to save them.
- Keep a physical address book. This is more for when I meet people in the flesh, and they are interested in taking part in an exchange. It saves me from multiple random tiny pieces of paper with addresses on them. This was especially helpful when I was travelling, as I collected addresses from all of the people that I met.
- Have a mail art travel kit. This allows me to create mail art on the go, whether I be sitting on a train or in a particularly boring meeting. My travel kit consists of an enveloppe of images (I like to draw from a source), an enveloppe of paper and cardboard pre-cut to postcard size for drawing on, and a pencil case filled with pens/markers/pencils. The important thing about my travel kit is that it is light-weight, and literally goes everywhere with me. During the England vs. Algeria FIFA world cup game (stalemate = boring) I broke out some cardstock and started drawing because nothing was happening on the pitch. It's like what the boy scouts say - be prepared.
- Find up-to-date addresses. In this regard, I have come to avoid mail-art.de. They don't have a system that allows people to delete old listings and replace them with new ones, so a good proportion of their addresses are out of date. The IUOMA is a great location to find other mail artists, and get their addresses (as many of you will well know). In addition, if you participate in mail art callouts that promise documentation to all participants, after the callout is completed, you will get a list of all the artists who participated as well as their addresses. Finally, many mail art webisites (like the one run by my friend Ross Priddle) will publish the addresses of people who have submitted mail.
- Be like Ford - create an assembly line. When it comes to documenting my work, I do everything in stages. There is no point in me scanning one image a day - it's a waste of my time. Rather, if I'm going to scan images I wait until I have a bunch that I can do all at once. The same goes for resizing images, preparing mail-outs, writing posts or anything else that relates to my mail art that is not the production stage.
- Create a surplus of images. This is useful for a number of reasons. I like being able to pick the perfect image for each person that I send something to, so it's nice to have a wide variety to pick from. Having a surplus of images also gives you some wiggle room for the days when you get sick, or have too much on your plate, or are feeling uninspired. Even if you can continue to create mail-art while nursing a terrible head cold, odds are you won't be up to scanning and documenting it as well.
- Create a digital and physical organization system. I've been at this for seven months, and have now created in excess of 250 pieces of mail art. To keep track of them all, I have created a filing system with redundancies, to save me if I happen to lose track of an image. When I scan each image, I create two copies - one which is full size, and gets filed by subject matter, and one which is the exact size necessary for my blog postings (this small step saves so much time! No fiddling with re-sizing images in posts!) which gets filed in a folder for images that have not been mailed yet. When I do mail a piece, that second image gets moved to a third folder for sent images that is organized by the month in which I mailed them. I have a similar physical two-prong filing system for images prior to mailing them off.
- Have a support system. Seriously. This is a major commitment that you are taking on, and there will be moments where you have no energy reserves left, and it all seems overwhelming. That's when you need your friends - not your mail art buddies, but the people who will take you out for a beer (or tea, or coffee) and listen to you gripe about how this has taken over your life.
I hope that you find my few words of advice helpful. If you're interested in seeing more of my work, feel free to take a gander at my website, www.thisisart.ca. Happy mailing.
November 29, 2010 at 9:11 PM
Hey Keira
Some really useful tips here. Must say that with all this talk of preparation I do feel totally underprepared! I 'm going to sort all my images out now.
November 29, 2010 at 11:53 PM
Ha ha ha! This is the system that I developed over seven months! I don't think that you need to do it all at once! Anyways, just because it works for me doesn't mean that it will work for you....
November 30, 2010 at 2:26 AM
I agree with Andy, I also feel a bit unprepared, but this post has bolstered my spirits! Thank you for this survival guide, this is extremely useful to a noob like me.
:)
November 30, 2010 at 4:02 AM
Great tips...
but the seat of my pants is ready for flying.....
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