Mail Art News #43: Mail Art, Music, and Movies with Ariel Greenwood
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| Blogger and Mail Art News spokesmodel, Ariel Greenwood |
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✉️ 📼 ✉️Thomas Brown (TB): How did you get into mail art?
Ariel Greenwood (AG): I was an outsider, unaware of the traditional mail art scene. I've always been a long-lost letter sender, writing to people I hadn't talked to in years. One of my earliest mail art experiments involved a lost etsy order from my shop, Found on the Forest Floor, for a one dollar item. The buyer said they didn't really care about the item and requested a replacement surprise instead. So I gathered leaves, clovers, glitter, pressed flowers, moss, dirt, miniature pinecones, acorn caps and other natural objects in an envelope with instructions to toss like confetti upon opening. It was a sensory experience of a woodland biome.
Two years ago, a friend of mine who crafts custom dollhouses was working on a project. I surprised her with a series of miniatures, whatever could fit in a standard envelope. A tiny spinning wheel, a bamboo rug, a miniature burlap sack found outside, and olive pits that look like small sweet potatoes were all things I sent over the year (2022).
I started sending stamped postcards, handmade cards, and collaged pieces more recently to a select group of pen pals.
TB: What's your favorite type of mail art to send / receive?
AG: I like to craft interactive activities, challenges, and presents to send to my friends and fellow artists. When it comes to checking my mailbox, my absolute favorite piece was from a friend I met at the fairy festival who sent me a Christmas card with homemade gnome stickers and a maple leaf painted to look like a fox face.
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| incoming, 2022 |
TB: You actually send a lot of mail at your day job. How does this intersect with your mail art endeavors?
AG: I work for a large nonprofit organization, specifically in a department that sends and receives materials from the entire state of Maryland. I'm in the mailroom often, packaging and processing shipments on the mail machine. The postal tape we use has pieces leftover that get discarded. I save the scraps and stamp pictures on them to make stickers out of. My most recent mail art project was sending out a round of these pieces and materials challenging artists to create their own stickers to keep or pass along.
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| outgoing, 2023 |
[Readers interested in receiving a sticker kit can send an email to mailartnews@gmail.com. Include your mailing address. Ariel asks that you use the hashtag #mailartstickerkit when posting your stickers to social media.]
TB: Does your love of 1960s psychedelic music influence your mail art?
AG: I find that my mail and music do intersect often. I find myself drawn to songs about mail and albums with mail themes, like Postcard by Mary Hopkin or Having a Wild Weekend by the Dave Clark Five because it has a postcard on the cover with the album name and band written on it. Me and my mail mates often recommend songs to each other within this theme, which is what inspired my "Postcard Playlist".
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Me and my friends participated in the AVAM's Cardworks project in 2022 where we all donated postcards to be auctioned off. Mine was inspired by the song Voices Green and Purple by The Bees.
TB: You're also into VHS tapes.
AG: Yes... I'm a big believer in the advantages of physical media. I'm sick of streaming because movies are here today, gone tomorrow and I would rather pay a dollar to own a favorite film on VHS than pay upwards of $3.99 to rent. This hobby has crossed over into my mail art, for example, in this piece featuring a hand carved tape stamp...
Although I mostly collect cottagecore cartoons, occasionally I find movies about the mail, like Il Postino, a classic! And imagine my surprise when I found a rare copy of Disney's Big Red containing a promotional postcard of the film's poster inside!
Links:
- Enter the Forest Again
- fairyarie on Instagram
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