Isolation Postcards / 2020
For the last month or so, I've been making and sending postcards, more or less daily.
Here's the context. Terry and I were in Adelaide to visit friends and family and see stuff at the Fringe and just generally hang out in the late summer. And then the thing that happened happened, and we decided to stay for a while longer.
It's hard for everyone to stay in touch with friends at the moment, and I'm finding it a particular struggle because most of my friends are in the UK, sleeping during my day and vice versa. Well, this is part of what postcards are for, right? A way of staying glancingly in touch with someone from far away.
Except postcards are meant to be about what you've been up to, and like a lot of people I've been up to very little recently. So instead of pictures of beaches and koalas and museums in big old buildings I've been sending postcards made out of stuff from around the house, stuff that's come up as part of day-to-day life. Catalogues, magazines, free newspapers, old postcards I had as a teenager that my mum cleared out of a box in her shed, paint catalogues I brought with me for a (now-cancelled) project, brochures I grabbed from a stand outside a travel agency as I walked past on the way to the supermarket. It was my birthday yesterday so now I've got some birthday cards and wrapping paper and boxes to work into postcards over the next week or so.
I'm obviously away from all my art materials so I started out with scissors and a glue stick, and after I'd made a few extremely wonky-edged postcards I ordered a scalpel and a cutting mat and some PVA, and developed a set of rules:
No buying anything specifically to go on the postcards - no "oh that paper's nice", no "look, a quirky second-hand book". Everything that goes on the cards has to be generated by what I'm actually doing on a day-to-day basis. If I buy wrapping paper to wrap a gift and have some left over, I can use that. If I get a recipe book to cook from I can cut phrases out as well. If I buy moisturiser then the box it comes in is fair game. Anything free that I walk past, brochures and catalogues: fine.
It's okay to buy materials like glue, scissors, double-sided tape etc.
No drawing or painting on top of the postcards; but after I did an online life drawing class with a friend I decided that it IS okay to take things I've drawn or painted and cut them up and use them as materials that can become part of the collages. I understand this is a fine distinction.
They're postcards, so I need to send them to people with a little note about what I've been up to lately, which can be either true or from a fantasy holiday. Either way, they don't count as finished till they're sent. (They don't have to arrive: I don't think many of them have arrived yet, given all the international postage delays).
It's really satisfying to make a tiny thing out of the detritus of strange everyday life, and writing the messages makes me feel less out-of-touch and distant, or at least it makes me feel out-of-touch and distant in a different way. It also helps fulfil my desire to feel productive, which given that my usual work tends towards “make games where people are in places together and everyone touches stuff a lot” is a neat and useful trick.
I invited people who wanted a postcard to fill in a google form. I’m currently working through that list. Some of them are people I know; some are strangers. If you put your name on the list then I’ve either sent you a postcard, or it’s coming; although with international post the way it is, it might take a while to get there. (I’ve had people report receiving them a week after I sent them, and people who still haven’t received theirs a couple of months after I posted it.)
