12 October 2010 - The First Mailart Lecture slides
my REAL wall - 12 October 2010 - The First Mailart Lecture slides, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.
Today I ran my first ever mailart lecture for the Art teaching students at my university.
After chatting with Jo, the senior lecturer about mailart a few weeks ago, it was decided that I should introduce it to the students and that they wold keep their journals in mailart form.
I decided that the lecture should show as much mailart as possible, and decided that instead of wasting all that lovely postcard joy, I would use the medium of mailart to creat the slides and then send them out straight after the show to the mailartists who had been kind enough to send things in for the show.
This meant that every time I ran the talk, which is scheduled to be once a year, I will need to make the whole thing again, and each presentation will be unique.
The session went down really well, students realising that the medium, with it's dimensions and it's constructive community, would be really good for some students in their classes.
By the end of the session, we had made some first cards, and some students had already taken the addresses of some of the mailartists on display with the intention of sending them something.
So here, for the first and last time, presented in the style of the PowerPoint Slide Sorter view are my slides for this session, roughly in the order they were presented.
At the bottom are the first two submissions from the art teachers themselves, and I hope to receive a few more in time.
All of these cards will be sent out shortly, so watch your inboxes!
Hooray Andy! How fun was that? Right? FUN. I'm glad you had a good first experience presenting on Mail Art. My Saturday talk went well, also. Mail Art rules!
Oh it was brilliant Mim! Already one of my students has joined postcrossing and IUOMA and is really active. I've received a piece from her already too, which is so satisfying. For me to talk about art for the first time in public was something new and very rewarding - I know more than I thought!
The best thing for me was not just to know that I was inspiring others to create mailart, but to know that by telling them about this artform that they would go out and use it to inspire children to create. What a wonderful thing! As I said in my lecture slides I personally felt so let down by my high school art teachers. With so much emphasis on technique and such harsh criticism I never took to art. And what a shame.
Something I only realised as I was talking was that criticism is a strange thing. If it comes from someone you know it hurts. If it comes from strangers it doesn't really matter, you can just shrug your shoulders. But with praise it is great whoever it comes from. To me that is why mailart has been such a productive artistic learning environment.
So yeah, I'm still buzzing with excitement over it, and me and Elena are busily working away at some mailart most nights of the week again. It's great.
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