Five years ago we were trying to get our heads around the horrors of a pandemic that was overwhelming cities’ capacities to bury victims, caused health officers to weep in press conferences, and saw hospitals expanding emergency departments into tent-covered parking lots. We wondered how long seniors and teens could endure “social distancing.” What would be the innovative workarounds?
Looking back on an art project from the summer of 2020 reminded me that I had listed “making mail art again” with about 40 other favourable outcomes that the lock down had caused. These were written in a poem (and image) under the plea, “keep this.” I just came across that poem, written and illustrated for the online project, The Pandemic is a Portal, hosted by sfugalleries.ca. As part of the project, the mail art maven Anna Banana, who has recently left us, invited the mail art network to contribute responses to the provocation of thinking of the pandemic as “an opportunity for change, a portal into a new world.” The call went on to explain, “We are interested in how we form community, which will shape this new world.”
The urgency to form and re-form communities might have lightened a little in the past five years, but we are feeling it again as leaders of global super-powers, particularly the administration of Canada’s neighbour to the south, flex their capacity for aggression and isolationism. I am noticing how the quantity of mail art coming through my mail box correlates to public insecurity. This week, as a flurry of orders threatening Canada’s economy and sovereignty were issued from the US White House, my mail box was filled with art and invitations to make more mail art. Here are some of the latest,
Elizabeth MacKenzie, Cleave 1 (2025) – A tiny accordion booklet that houses 12 drawings from MacKenzie’s Cleave Project, an on-going response to genocidal attacks on Gaza. Each of the images is a highly detailed rendering of an cluster of bubbles, and each are accompanied by a short excerpt taken from writings of those directly affected by the attacks. They start with “enforced starvation,” and include “shock inside of shock inside of shock,” and “empathy of convenience.” These idea-fragments appear to be accumulating in Cleave like bubbles or cells inside an unstable bit of lather on a hard surface. The images relate to how the origin of life might be pictured. A hand-scribed explanation on the back cover explains that already there are over 500 of these drawings in the larger project.
Ginger Mason, Persevering Resistance (2025; edition of 27) – This little back folded zine is like a sister to Cleave 1, or maybe a response. Rebecca Solnit’s words copied on the pages instruct, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything, and you are not going to let them…The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving….” Mason illustrates the sentiments with salvaged postage stamps and artiststamps. One of them, that perhaps Mason made, has found text that sums up the book’s message, “It’s the expression of Hope”, Jenny Holzer style.
Elaine Rounds, The Poetry of the Garden (2025) – This third folded book, a third sister, is like a colourful diversion from the others. It is an empty book made simply from a colour photocopy print of flowered fabric from a silk jacket that Elaine once received from her beloved daughter (and fashion designer), Katie, now sadly passed. The words, The Poetry of the Garden are written overtop the print on the last spread of pages. Alongside the booklet, Elaine wrote, “Perhaps you would use [this booklet] as a small canvas to send to another.” I’ve decided to re-title it “Garden Migrations” and to send it to Elizabeth MacKenzie with instructions to send it on to Ginger Mason.
There was also mail art from Cyndy Chwelos’s everyday objects project, but that warrants a more fulsome blog post a little further into the year-long project. Watch for that! Thank you, mail art sisters and community, for filling the mailbox and my heart, just when it is needed