Good Mail Day

 
 
Good Mail Day

A Primer for Making Eye-Popping Postal Art

by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler

Quarry Press

2009

 

 

Good Mail Day is a craft book - half photos of art, half instructions for making similar art yourself. In this case, it's 'mail art,' which refers to any sort of stationary and envelope that are in some way decorated or embellished by the sender. Good Mail Day also has advice for forming pen-pal relationships with other mail artists, and joining what they call 'the Network' of mail artists nationally and globally.

 
Hinchcliff and Wheeler favor a style of mail art that takes advantage of collage and assemblage of found objects, cut up and reassembled to make your own envelopes or paper, or as decorative accents. They also use hand-carved rubber stamps to add an extra pop. They favor immediacy and contingency - look for interesting papers around you as you go about your day, collect them, and use them to make your next mail art. 

 
They argue that working quickly, rather than trying to craft a perfect letter, makes it easier to send out more letters, and makes each mail art project indelibly 'of the moment' because it bears the mark of wherever you were and whatever you were doing when you made it. They think this also encourages you to go out more and see more new places so that you can find more materials.

 
Mail art can simply be traded back and forth between pairs of artists, or one can put out a call for submissions. The most famous submission-based mail art project, although not mentioned here, is probably Post Secret. The Good Mail Day book itself is also full of examples of such submissions.

 
It's a fun, inspiring book, and reminds me of Nick Bantock's epistolary novels made up of his decorative letters. Hinchcliff and Wheeler's aesthetic recommendations (and the reasoning beind them) remind me the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists, with their use of cut-ups, collage, and found objects.