My friend Jason Brown has been organizing and hosting mail art gallery events in Nashville, Tennessee for the past 10 years. Mail art, a movement that dates back to the 1950s and 60s, often involves collage, rubber stamps and a tradition of challenging the postal system by mailing irregularly shaped objects or ones with addresses that have to be picked out of elaborate designs (Tennessean, 2014). Mail art is super fun to create, navigate through the postal system, and receive!
Mr. Brown’s most recent project is called, My View From Home, and encourages participants to find joy in their surroundings whilst living through a pandemic. Originally from London, he encourages everyone, worldwide, to participate in his mail art events. So, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for Stalford students to reflect on their Covid-19 homestay/isolation experience.
I created an A4-sized postcard for the students to use as the postcard where they made their artwork. Each class has been tasked with thinking about a different aspect of their experience to refer to in their mail artwork. On one side of their postcard, the students draw or collage a piece of artwork relating to the subject matter on which they are reflecting. For some classes, the students thought about their online learning experience and teachers. For other classes, the students focused on what they did while they were in their house (study, read, play with their pets, video games, etc.). One of my classes looked at the shape of the virus, another class thanked their parents for caring for them during this outbreak, and another class looked at the jobs of the many health care employees working tirelessly around the clock.
The second side of the postcard includes the address box, the postage stamp, and a place for writing a note. In the note section of their postcards, the students were asked to provide advice to other children their age of how best to deal with and protect oneself during an isolation and homestay period. In this section, some students provided practical advice, such as washing hands and wearing masks, while other students talked about how best to use one’s time and which video games they would recommend.
We are still working very hard on our postcards but look forward to sending close to 125 postcards to Nashville, Tennessee before May 31st. Once in Tennessee, the postcards will be photographed and catalogued by the Special Collections department at Vanderbilt University Library. Vanderbilt is a top school in the United States with many distinguished alumni and affiliates. It is an absolute honor that our students are getting the opportunity to participate in this creative and reflective project and have really enjoyed the process.
