MAIL ART AND AUSTRALIA 1993 – 2025
Introduction
“In mail art the audience becomes active as artists, there is no jury or curator, submissions are open, everything received is shown, there are no entry fees, and all who participate receive a form of documentation.”
Sue Hartigan, Artist Book Year Book, 2013
Mail Art is an artistic movement based on the act of exchanging art through the postal system. It is often an personal exchange, a collage of thoughts, moods or reactions to the world we live in. Mail Art embraces participation, accessibility, and takes a stance against the commercialisation of art.
This ethos also informs the history and practice of the artist book, particularly the bookworks of small press, hand-made, and distributed networks which confound institutional boundaries. Both mail art and artist books can be seen as part of a larger mapping of arts practices that prioritise connection, narrative and shared authorship over expensive art objects and gallery walls.
Mail art emerged in the 1960s, directly influenced by Fluxus. The Fluxus movement believed anyone could be an artist, and anyone could participate. It was an art movement which also, at its core, challenged the exchange and value hierarchies of the international art market. Artists in the Fluxus movement emphasised process over the finished product and were interested in fostering a spirit of collaboration. Mail Art has at its heart these same principles.
New York Correspondence School
Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, founded in the 1960s, is widely considered to be the crucible of the Mail Art movement. Johnson invited artists to submit exhibition works by mail, sparking a global network of creative exchange. Johnson used mailing lists and encouraged recipients of his correspondence to forward, respond to, or alter what they received. The spirit of the project lives on in artist networks such as the International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA).
IUOMA, founded in 1988, formalised a global network of mail artists. With the rise of the internet, IUOMA launched an online platform in 2008, which continues to be active. Even as practices moved online, the Mail Art ethos—physical, participatory, and distributed through the postal system—remained strong, much like artist books in the digital age, which continued to find new relevance through zines and hybrid analog/digital publishing models.
Selected Mail Art Projects in Australia by Julie Barratt
Mail art developed in Australia through the natural expansion of the international network through the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a desire for local artists to connect with global trends outside of the commercial market. Examples are the Mail Art Femail Art movement in Brisbane and the Visual /Concrete Poetry Movement. Artists re-locating to Australia also built our connection to international movements. I would like to discuss four specific projects within the last thirty years of mail art practice.
Field Study (1993–present)
Field Study began in London in 1993, founded by David Dellafiora, Benedict Phillips, and Eamonn Kirwan—three unemployed artists with an ironic take on the art world. A mix of seriousness— they were serious about their art practice— tongue in cheek—they realised a resumé with an extensive exhibition list equalled “success” (mail art projects would be synonymous with exhibitions)— along with anti-establishment sentiment —they were not interested in producing product for a market— was behind the motivation to form what has become an on-going, international mail art platform.
David later relocated Field Study to Geelong, Australia, aligning geographically with the cultural periphery that mail art has always inhabited. Field Study publishes assembling projects: WIPE, ReSite, and KART, and invites anyone—regardless of background or practice—to contribute.
US–Australia Mail Art Project (2009–2011)
Initiated by Tara O’Brien (USA), this project brought together six artists—three from the US and three from Australia. Tara visited Australia in 2009 to judge the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists’ Book Award. She connected with local artists Heather Matthew and Babette Angel and invited them to participate in the project. Tara also invited Anne-Maree Hunter whom she knew from the South Korean Seongnam International BookArts symposium & book fair in 2008. When Babette pulled out after the first year Tara invited Monica Oppen to join. The US based artists were Tara O’Brien, Melanie Mavinski and Kate Baldwin.
Each artist took turns choosing a book format and theme. The turn around timeframe was 2 months. Participants created an edition of six and mailed five to the others. This two-year exchange culminated in the 2012 US exhibition Postal Pinacotheca, showcasing the collaborative and disciplined potential of mail art and included artists.
The Hanky Project (2010)
This project, born from personal grief, invited artists to mail in artworks made on handkerchiefs – an object commonly associated with mourning, with grief. The result was a deeply emotional collection of over 150 pieces from around the world, speaking of loss, of remembrance, of grief, of enduring the death of a loved one.
Exhibited in Alstonville at Barratt Galleries (2010) and at Napier Gallery, Melbourne (2011), the project stitched together a global conversation on death and healing.
“Men’s hankies with blue or brown borders, large. Small lace hankies, delicate. Cheap hankies, functional. Hand-stitched and embroidered. Plain. Packets of six. Unfurled in pockets they are handled and handled, like worry beads, like blankies. They are imbued with the mucosal expectorations of their owners. They are stiff with salt. They sop up. They stem the abject overflow.”
Virginia Barratt
A Book About Death: Australian Edition (2013)
Originally created by Matthew Rose (USA) in 2009, as a homage to both mail art founder Ray Johnson and his work, A Book About Death (1963–1965) the project A Book About Death invited artists from around the world to contribute postcard-sized works that, together, formed an unbound book. The first exhibition was at the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in New York City and went on to travel throughout the USA. It generated new exhibitions internationally including Wales, Brazil and Australia.
The 2013 Australian ‘edition’, which I co-curated with Heather Matthew, continued with the open submission model. The response to the project was overwhelming. Over 300 artists from all over the world submitted works. Each postcard was both a page and a standalone artwork—an artist book in dispersed form, sent and received through the post.
The cards were exhibited at Tweed Regional Gallery in 2013. Original mail art works from that 2009 exhibition were also included. The last iteration of A Book About Death was in 2019 again in New York City at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island for the tenth anniversary, marking the end of the project.
Project profile by Monica Oppen
The Weight of Absence (2017–2024)
PARTICIPANTS: Julie Barratt, Monica Oppen, Anne Twigg
BEGINNING THE PROJECT
In 2017 we were in Brisbane for the abbe 2017 conference. It was drawing to a close. Soon we would be leaving to three different locations 1000s of kilometres apart. I suggested we stay in touch via a mail art project. I’d been in Germany visiting Uta Schneider in Offenbach am Main (outside Frankfurt) and she had shown me a set of cards—an ongoing correspondence with an artist friend. I remembered this project that last afternoon in Brisbane. I only half recalled how Uta’s exchange had worked but it didn’t matter we would create our own system of exchange. It wasn’t a mail art project in the traditional sense but rather a correspondence through colour and image and ideas.
This image shows our system of exchange. It was easier to explain through a diagram than in words. As you can see we all ended up with a stack of our own cards returned rather than our correspondents’ cards and this is perhaps the more unusual aspect of the correspondence.
GUIDELINES
Key guidelines (to give the project longevity) were restricting the artwork size to a postcard, no editioning required, no time constraints in answering. There was no end goal. Other guidelines were the card had to be sent via the postal system, the card could be worked both sides, any medium was permissible. To keep the interchange a “dialogue” we had to respond to an element in the received card whether it was a colour, an idea, texture or pattern… Also we could work back into the received card, adding to it. Projects we were working on, current political topics, (border control, nationhood, environment, treatment of asylum seekers, the same sex marriage referendum and the pandemic) all creep into the cards in various ways.
The correspondence ran its course. The last cards were exchanged between Anne and myself in the early months of 2024, or was it the last months of 2023? I don’t remember. Even though there had never been an end project imagined we were all curious about bringing the cards together, to gather them. Entry into the Mackay Artspace Libris Award 2025 became the lacking end point.
RECALLING THE PROCESS
Monica Oppen:
“Each card was always a moment of experimentation, a break from more restricted projects. My approach was spontaneous and quick. The reliance on snail mail to deliver meant a natural pause happened between sending the card and receiving an answer. Without that pause it would have been too intense.”
Anne Twigg:
“I found it exciting going to my letterbox and finding a letter with cards. There was the shear joy of opening the envelope, knowing I would be faced with a challenge. I always felt a compulsion to reply as quickly as I could. The awareness to get to work on a response was there until it was done and sent. It became vital part of my life. If I was between other projects the cards were something I could get on with. I’m not sure how much the cards had an influence on my other projects.
“The project made me interested in the post, how long would it take to get there, did I have stamps, and I noticed the red box down the street and when it was emptied then one day it was gone!”
Julie Barratt: “There was immense joy in the tactile act of constructing, sending and receiving – paper touched (and altered) by another’s hand, ideas carried over huge distances and the delight of the envelope arriving with meaning, bridging the gap between isolation and community. A gesture of connection.”
BRINGING THE CARDS TOGETHER IN SEQUENCE
The process of bringing the cards together was stressful. Each one of us had only numbered the first few cards and then the numbers fell away. Even fewer cards had dates. There were very few clear markers to hold the sequence in a particular order. The narrative thread had always been very open and sometimes tangental. The thread could switch from theme to a colour, then move from a colour to a texture. Although Anne and I had kept our cards in order, Julie had not. Ordering Julie’s cards into mine and Anne’s had me looking for other lines of connection. For example I recognised my own additions on Julie’s cards. There were themes running between the cards, that I recalled. There were cards I had never seen before which were the correspondence between Julie and Anne. But there were also cards, my own cards, which I didn’t even remember. As I struggled to rigorously to keep everything in the right order, I had to ask myself, did it matter?
BUILDING THE STRUCTURE
With all the cards in my possession I began to wonder how to put them together. Pinning them to a gallery wall was out of the question because all cards were worked on, both sides.
My starting point was Ben Elbel’s album which had pages that you could slot in and out. However I soon abandoned this structure. The cards had to be fixed because they belonged in a particular order and I had to keep reminding myself, there were a lot of cards. At the beginning of the project the cards were only slightly different in size, but they became larger and more erratic in form as the years passed so I decided that any structure which required a consistent ‘page’ size was out.
Then I designed a display box that would hold the cards. However, again, the number of cards had me abandon this design. There had to be a flexibility and simplicity in the structure. The answer came in combining three ready-made objects: plywood boards, carbon fibre rods and slide clips.
THE MAKING
The making was a very organic process as I responded to growing structure, problem-solving as I proceeded. The slide clips had an inner width of 4mm which fitted easily onto the 3mm diameter carbon fibre rods. The thirty-one rods were spaced across the plywood struts so that the cards had enough space to turn without obstructing each other. The rods were threaded through a series of holes drilled into the plywood. At first I thought the structure would be easy to take apart and re-assemble. However, as I built it, I realised this was not going to be the case. The rods were a metre long. Not only the cards but also the intermediate plywood struts which separated the lines of correspondence and were structurally important, had to be threaded along the thirty-one rods.
COMMENTS
The making was a very organic process as I responded to growing structure, problem-solving as I proceeded. The slide clips had an inner width of 4mm which fitted easily onto the 3mm diameter carbon fibre rods. The thirty-one rods were spaced across the plywood struts so that the cards had enough space to turn without obstructing each other. The rods were threaded through a series of holes drilled into the plywood. At first I thought the structure would be easy to take apart and re-assemble. However, as I built it, I realised this was not going to be the case. The rods were a metre long. Not only the cards but also the intermediate plywood struts which separated the lines of correspondence and were structurally important, had to be threaded along the thirty-one rods.
CONCLUSION
Mail art’s continued vibrancy mirrors that of the artist book: both are formats of resistance, of personal storytelling, of handmade thought. They’re not just objects—they’re gestures, stories folded into envelopes, ideas stitched or glued by hand, ink smudged by fingertips. The all-encompassing flexibility of the genre allows for modification and inspiration ensuring artists’ engagement into the future.
References:
1. Hartigan, Sue Field Study International: Celebrating 20 years in the Field Artist Book Year Book, UWE, 2013
2. International Union of Mail-Artists website https://iuoma-network.ning.com/
3. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art Accessed June 2025
This talk was delivered by Julie Barratt and Monica Oppen in July 2025 at the abbe 25 conference at Mackay Artspace, Mackay, Qld.