Let’s say that 2025 is the year of creative prompts, over here at RML HQ. It is now six months into Everyday Things, a year-long series of creative provocations in mail art by Cyndy Chwelos. Just before the start of the year, Chwelos invited a small group of friends and colleagues to join in a project that would involve monthly packets of a mail art card and what she described as “a question, a poem, a thought, a quote, an observation in the card that may inspire your response.” For the response, every packet has included a blank piece of paper inside a stamped envelope addressed back to Chwelos. All of the materials, including the blank slip and return envelope, have been unique in their shapes and textures. So even though the packet is thematic, with a probing thought or topic, the blank pieces are also provocations. They seem to ask, what can be fit into these small containers and frames? And, of course, Cyndy Chwelos’s own “cards” are inspiring! The six that have already been received are multi-part collages with digitally-drawn colour illustrations of everyday objects and scenes that are layered and affixed to sturdy paper with artful sewing machine stitching. One particularly elaborate card features a rendering of the sewing machine atop layers of a tissue paper pattern and orange rickrack ribbon.
The Everyday Things prompts have been generative,
- January – “2025 is the year I will…” (I drew a picture of the sit-up that I hope to do independently no later than December 31, 2025.)
- February – “Thus does the marvellous interrupt our lives,” a quote from The Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price (I made a card about a snowy tree filled with birds that I had seen around the time of the card’s marvellous interruption in my mail box.)
- March – “Tell me something about your mom” (I copied and coloured some of my recently departed mother’s drawings.)
- April – “Tools” (I drew some of the simplest but most favoured kitchen utensils in this house.)
- May – “Scissors” from Lorna Crozier’s The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things (I made a weaving using scissors, scraps of fabric from my sewing table, and the blank kraft paper tag that was in the envelop. I also included a lone jigsaw puzzle “piece of sky” from a Yoko Ono exhibit that I once visited.)
- June – “Travel” (I included an “erasure poem” that I began during a recent trip to the beach near Parksville.)
The erasure poem resulted from another series of prompts that I have been working through since April when Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy arrived. This gem of a publication is a bundle of 100 open-ended prompts for journaling, each by a different contributor, whose connection to Jaouad is hinted at in the short bios at the end of the book. It is a book and concept that has grown out of relationality and support, as Jaouad describes in the introduction and chapter essays. A 100-day prompt set out by designer Michael Bierut (included in the book) helped her immediate family through a critical and harrowing phase of her cancer treatment. For Jaouad and many of the contributors, journaling, or the work of following other intentional creative prompts, are “life-altering and even life-saving” practices (xxiv). The alchemy is in the combination of emptying the mind and heart in facing the prompt, and then letting the associations and ideas flutter in, sometimes resulting in the immediate impulse to put ideas to page, or letting them all settle before honing the response into something meaningful. The Book of Alchemy has been a dear evening friend since April.
Related to everyday prompts, Madeleine Wood’s More than SUM began as a practice of documenting everyday surfaces, before it became a grid painting now hanging above her bed. Last week when we were talking about The Book of Alchemy and the journaling I have been doing with it, Wood reminded me of the painting and the 2019 residency at Comox Valley Art Gallery (CVAG) where she made the work. As a way to process the chaos of a prolonged house renovation and the adjustment to rural life on Vancouver Island, the task of painting a series of squares, each reflecting a surface and colour from the palette of that life, helped her to focus and contain her control-defying life. Setting out a grid to fill with small views of beauty or thoughts of “marvels” is indeed a kind of life-saving strategy.
The art cards and provocations sent by Cyndy Chwelos in Everyday Things so far all fit in a sturdy red envelope from one of the first mailings. I am imagining that altogether they are a book in a mail art assembling format. These are the RML books that have (so far) been returned to Chwelos:
- January – Clare Yow (2024), ac·cu·mu·la·tions
- February – Tania Willard and Leah Decter (2024), Directions to BUSH Gallery
- March – Deanne Achong (2024), Mama D’Lo and Missy G Under the Sea
- April – Crista Dahl (2020), The Migrators
- May – Peter Morin and Leah Decter (2024), x: the meeting place makes the spine
- June – Misti Ko (2017), The Migration Pattern of a Single Human