February 22, 2013

my REAL wall in Suffolk


Posted shortly after we returned from Chinese New Year in Hong Kong – check out the the New Year Snake from DumpsterDiver in the centre.

Your postcards followed me and Elena to Suffolk where they found themselves on a gate in a field. Not just any gate though – it’s the gate of Mailartist Rebecca Guyver and in the distance you can see Patricks bothy in the field.

Some real stars of the post are represented on the wall today. Starting in the top left, we have 365er Stripygoose, who sent this watercolor to Elena a while back with a Barbados stamp, so from somewhere much warmer than here.

Working down the fence post, is a new artist Susan McAllister who seems to be using Sharpies for this piece.

Below her, a watercolor from Katerina Nikoltsou and below that a note from Heleen de Vaan. The note accompanied a book, in which Heleen was one of the featured artists, naming me and my REAL wall as one of her artistic inspirations! What an honour!

Down the central column you see art from Lisa Feltypants, who I met virtually and in the post in the original Twitter #mailart project about 2 years ago. I was a fan of her art as soon as I saw it and still am today. This plate was done on a camping trip and sent to me after I requested it on Twitter.

Below her is UK mailartist Lee Jackson who always sends very small packages containing little books.

Dumpsterdiversanonymous always makes an awesome Chinese New Years Card, and this year I was on the receiving end of a year of the snake card!

The final one in that column is from Jenn Philips, who until recently was called Jenn Angus. She married my friend Ivan Philips, with whom I went to India in 2007 so congrats to you both! She’s recently come to London where she saw lots of theatre.

The final colum features art from Gina from Taiwan. Gina got in touch via Postcrossing direct message and I sent one back to her straight away, which is really rare for me, but I loved her card and wanted to make sure that she got a reply. I know I know, I should always do that, but you know how it is.

Rebecca Resinski and I swapped lots of pics of the sky in 2008. Check them out at http://www.your-sky-our-sky.blogspot.co.uk/ and finally the last of the bunch and definitely not the least comes from Gutwrench on Etsy, who I will tell you time and again is worth every penny of your money in the post. Check out her Etsy site at http://www.etsy.com/shop/gutwrench

February 21, 2013

my REAL wall visits Rebecca Guyver – Part 2


It’s been a while since I posted all the post that I have received on a wall anywhere, and the more I procrastinated and left it, the worse the problem seems to have become. I have a pile of postcards in need of posting on a wall and decided while at Rebecca’s place, that I would finally get around to posting them all.

So here they are, on the wall of Rebecca’s studio in Suffolk.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in, including Stripygoose, Katerina, Lancilotto and Mailart Martha.

February 19, 2013

my REAL wall visits Rebecca Guyver – Part 1

This weekend Elena and I paid a visit to someone very special. Rebecca Guyver is an artist who first sent in a class set of mailart to our Little Big Stories mailart call for Pimlico library. Since then we’ve exchanged mailart and crossed paths on IUOMA and last year, when Rebecca finished her 365 in style, Stripygoose and I conspired to go up and meet her over a weekend.

Things came and went and fell through and finally, this weekend, Elena bought me a skydiving package, which meant I got to jump from a plane in Suffolk. Remembering that Rebecca just happened to live in Suffolk, we made our arrangements and stayed over at hers on Friday night!

The day was spent at the local boot fair and looking around town and Rebecca was the perfect host, and in the afternoon we got down to the business of mailart in the studio.

This chair was the first thing we saw when we got out the car and it lives in the studio. It’s the bed of Lyra the Guyver family dog and that shredded stuff you see in the foreground is her pillow. Was her pillow.

I had to get the mailart into this scene as it made me smile to see the cute dog surrounded by the destruction.

Lyra the dog

February 17, 2013

my REAL wall on the cable car in Hong Kong

Elena and I have just come back from Hong Kong, where we were for 5 days. We were very very lucky to have been given the flights and our accommodation by the Hong Kong Tourist Board and Cathay Pacific, because we went with our carnival group, Sunshine International Arts and danced in costume in the Chinese New Year festival.

The whole thing was an incredible experience, but 5 days in full costume, dancing on the road meant we were exhausted when we came back. We did however, get a few half days here and there to get out and about, so I took the opportunity to take your postcards out for a little tour of the country.

It’s been a while since I posted in public, and I must admit I was a little too shy to post in downtown Hong Kong, where the whole of humanity would have crowded around curiously asking questions, but when we got the cable car in Lantau Island up the giant copper Buddha on the mountain we found ourselves alone and I took the chance to get a couple of pics.

my REAL wall on the cable car in Hong Kong

 

As a little bonus, here’s some footage of me and Elena and our group on the road in Hong Kong. Elena is the one in the silver butterfly costume at the front and I am controlling the big black rastaman puppet. Enjoy!

January 10, 2013

my REAL wall and Stripygoose present 5 postcards 2013 (Introduction lecture wall)

Stripygoose and Andytgeezer present 5 Postcards 2013

2013-01-09 12.14.23

Over the years, I’ve been getting involved with mailart shows and projects with my REAL wall and it’s been such a hoot. Some shows and projects are now going into their second year, which I think is very flattering and this is one of those projects. 5 postcards was a project dreamt up by me and a lecturer at my university, Sue. I have always liked mixing business and pleasure and believe deeply in the educational benefit of tangible objects being exchanged between people, which is why I set up Schoolswaps.

We wanted to use postcards to get students thinking about school experiences. The idea was to get students to think of 5 incidents that happened to them in school, either as students or as teachers, that stuck with them. They then have to create 5 postcards illustrating these experiences.

Last year, the postcards blew us away. We were taken on quite a journey and found that the exercise really opened students up and got them expressing themselves. In the end we even collated all the postcards into a book, which we distributed to the students and done all sorts of extra work as it was such a thrill.

As a result of all this excitement, Sue signed up for Mailart 365 and has been steadily creating all year.

Oh yeah and on the subject of MA365…

I MADE IT! I just completed today!

365

Aaaaaanyway…Todays REAL walls come from the introductory lesson to this years project. It’s a new class with new students but we wanted to build on last years success and do it again. So in todays lesson, Sue and I brought out some mailart from our collections. On the wall you can see some of the mailart that I’ve received since the last time I posted mingled among some of Sue’s own collection. I’ve never actually rifled through Sue’s collection and I have sent her one or two pieces. It was quite strange to see my works again that I had sent off but always a pleasure to see artists that I know in her collection, like Cornpone and Mim and she recognised works from Suus in Mokum and Rebecca in my collection.

Artists that Sue had never seen from my collection include Hope. There’s lots of post from Hope, who’s artwork I always adore. She’s an artist I will tell you time and again that you should subscribe to, because her letterpress is AWESOME!

Students picked out favourites from Angie and Snooky and Boo Cartledge as well as saying they loved Sue’s style.

So now the students have to go away and think about their experiences and start their creative process. I can’t wait to see what they create!

December 13, 2012

Your REAL wall on tour with Rejin Leys in New York

Whoop whoop! Always love it when mailart goes out on tour. Recently, in response to a tweet from regular REAL wall contributor Rejin Leys I decided to send a photo from an earlier REAL wall. Little did I know, that my little piece of mailart would go and have it’s only little REAL adventure. So, hang tight folks and lets go around New York with Rejin Leys!

The first tweeted pic was on November 21st, reporting our first field trip “together”

 

May I say, I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and I’m very glad that Rejin kept me wrapped up warm

Then, on the 26th November we went out again, around NY

What a thrill – I’d never been to NY before and now I was going and seeing all the sites!

The last place we visited in November was the Unisphere, which I think was in Men in Black

Now, my little pic is probably up somewhere in the house on a REAL wall where it belongs. What a lovely trip. Thanks Rejin!

July 27, 2012

Featured resource – Postcrossing

As part of the 3 year retrospective sent in to the Real show, I wanted to cover some of the resources that have made my REAL wall the place it is today and the first resource I was told about where people meet to swap post was Postcrossing

The Postcrossing project is a great starting point for anyone wanting to get into post. The setup is very intuitive, you just make an account and send post, and as a result of sending you will get one back from someone else.

In the early days, Postcrossing was how I found other people to send to, so I spent more than a year sending out Postcrossings and made some very good friends via the site who I still send to today.

My REAL wall owes a lot to Postcrossing, as the constant, reliable stream of postcards from postcrossers kept me going in the early days when I wasn’t sure that people would really be up for this postcard thing. It was good to know, from seeing how enthusiastic postcrossers are, that people were still keen to send postcards. I wasn’t just imagining it!

In October after starting my REAL wall, my project was featured on the official Postcrossing blog, which was a huge thrill and drew in even more post. I have always been able to rely on Postcrossing for a fix of postal goodness!

July 20, 2012

my REAL wall Featured Artist – Gareth Hopkins

As part of the 3 year my REAL wall retrospective, I enter the Featured Artists galleries and the very first artist to step up to the wall is Gareth Hopkins, a UK based artist and illustrator. The reason he’s the first featured artist in the retrospective is because my REAL wall would have not been nearly as interesting a place so fast if it hadn’t been for him.

Gareth was the first person to respond to my Gumtree ad for post and slowly introduced me to Postcrossing and mailart.

This is by no means all the artwork and post he’s sent me, as I reserved some of his artworks for other galleries I’ll be sending in, notably, Send me your Status, but this includes some important works, including the original letter and the one in which he introduces me to The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and mailart, as well as 2 copies of the Intercorstal, an ongoing comic that he has produced.

To see more information on the pieces on the wall, just click on the wall above, which will take you through to flickr where you can hover over the image for more detailed information.

I’ve met Gareth a few times and he still continues to stay in touch and inspire. In fact, he’s the one who introduced me to the Real Gallery, where he lives in plot 25, so ultimately it’s down to him that I’m doing a retrospective at all

July 11, 2012

Retrospective 4 – Classified Ad

After 2 weeks of waiting for REAL post to come in, I took out an ad on an online classified ads site that’s really popular here in London called Gumtree.

I decided that if I couldn’t get the friends I know to send me post, then I just needed to make new friends.

At that time, Facebook had just set itself so that all profiles were publicly viewable for the first time (my idea actually preceded theirs but I’m not going to pull Zuck up about it) so the timing was just perfect for an ad like this.

I saved the original wording in an email and the wording you are reading are as close to the words as I could make them so that they still made sense today and didn’t embarrass me too much (another early version of the ad can be seen on my blog.

This is being sent in to plot 45 today.

And in other plot 45 related news, thanks to you lot, my wonderful penpals and reader, plot 45 has outgrown the miniscule foot square cage they’ve given me, not once but TWICE! Where before the plot was housed in the main gallery with the other 100 plot, we now reside upstairs in a gallery on our own!

Keep em coming and I’ll keep the my REAL wall retrospective coming from here!

July 11, 2012

Retrospective 3 – Send to receive

As part of the 3 year retrospective of my REAL wall, I decided to send a postcard to each of the other 50 plots (there were initially 50 plots but they added another 50).

The idea was that after opening my REAL wall, I received no post and decided that the best way to receive post was to send it. This is ultimately the first rule to live by in the world of postal media. You must send to receive, it’s only fair.

At the beginning I really didn’t know what to send and to whom to get good stuff back, so I pretty much sent to everyone.

The first rule of postal networking

There is of course an ulterior motive to this as well.

Some of the other plots at the Real network are empty and I wanted to test to see if their owners were paying any attention, or if they’d just abandoned the plots. I know loads of awesome artists who would love to live in one of these and it kinda sickens me to see a good opportunity go to waste, so I sent a few prods out.

I’m also interested to see whether the organisers will actually put all my post into the boxes. Lots of folk who own plots seem to have taken a very controlled approach to their displays, and you can see why. Some of them are designers or companies and to be honest they haven’t done much but put a single item in, so I wanted to test to see what the limits were. Would they be delivered? Would they be taken out? It’s all part of the fun!

[Update - Real tweeted this part, despite having not put out ALL the cards in the other plots]

[Update - Started receiving things too]

Plot 045: @andytgeezer You have received a message (and two prints!) from Plot 006: @armyofcats #welovereal twitter.com/WeLoveReal/sta…

— We Love Real (@WeLoveReal) July 18, 2012