How I Got Into Mail Art

I do mail art. I've been active in the network for about a year and a half, sending postcards, photographs, artist trading cards, artistamps, and participating in Carving Consortium swaps. I got started about 1998 with a friend who told me about an art show in Oslo, Norway looking for entries with an H2O theme. All entries were accepted and there would be a catalog of the show for all participants. I didn't know what mail art was yet, I just thought it was a mainstream art show with no jury. At the time, I was in my first photography class at Penn Valley Community College and had made a lovely image of the water in Brush Creek on the Plaza. I printed it on nice paper and sent it in.

After a while, I got the catalog from the show. Guttorm Nordo sent out a glossy mini-magazine-style catalog with articles and art from the participants; it was a very well produced piece of work. From it, I learned about mail art, it's precepts and saw examples of DaDa, Fluxus, collage and many other types of mail art as well as photographs like mine. All our addresses were listed in the back for me to use as a starting point to begin networking with other artists. Then, in my third photography class, I got pregnant. Forgetting about the new frontier (to me) of mail art, I concentrated on my photography and my new daughter. Then, one day about the time my son was 4 months old, I was surfing the internet and found the International Union of Mail Artists website. The site told me "Apply to Become a Member, Become a Member by Applying" so I did.