The House of Art Wall, a photo by Stimpdawg on Flickr.

This is the first House of Art Wall. I borrowed the idea from my friend Andy's my REAL wall. He posts mailart and postcards that he receives on a wall in his house. He even told me about the adhesive board you see my postcards on. It allows you to stick paper or photos onto the sticky board without any tape. For some reason I could only find it available in England and not in the USA.

The postcards are some I've received and a few are ones I have collected during my travels. The postcard on the top left is a postcard that Lil Dave wrote to his dad Big Dave when we were traveling. It's a picture of a boy holding a monkey in front of the Seashore Temple in Mahabalipuram, India. The next one over is from a Sichuan Opera that we went to in Chengdu, China. The next postcard is from Andy from my REAL wall which contains many pictures of him. The last one in that row is a postcard from a Couchsurfing Spanish couple who stayed with us - it's from where they live in Spain.

The first postcard in the next row is a friend Raynell who I met on ICQ years ago. She sent me a postcard from her backyard in Waimānalo, Hawaii. I recently reconnected with her on Facebook after finding this postcard when I was packing up my stuff in my old room at my parent's house. There's a postcard of the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, Italy that we visited. It's a creepy, but cool crypt where skeletons and bones are placed as lamps, monks and in patterns. The last postcard in that row is from Keep Writing Postcards project. It's a homemade postcard that I receive monthly. You can receive the postcards from her Etsy shop.

There's a few more postcards that I found along my travels. There's a Salvador Dali postcard from Australia and The Colosseum from Rome, Italy. I like the Dream Bangkok postcard that has a pink trailer on it. This modern hotel has the best free postcards that I've ever seen and I've been to many hotels traveling around the world for 3 years. There's also a postcard from the Sydney Underground Film Festival which has a picture of a lady with windows of men in them which reminds me of Dali. The last one is a picture of the Mena House Oberoi in Cairo, Egypt taken in 1920. Joy Loves Adventure is the second homemade postcard I received from the Keep Writing Postcards project.

The washboards are around The House of Art Wall. My fiance Ivan bought the washboard on the right for Christmas. It turned out to be the wrong color and type. The company said he could keep it and then sent the right one which is listed on the left side. Now I have to learn to play it! Ever since I saw a girl playing it in a band on the street in New Orleans, I've always wanted one.

I would love to receive a postcard or mailart from you. I'll send something to you! Go here to contact me with your information.

In November 2011, I attended Teachmeet London and gave a brief presentation on the use of postcards in teaching. I referred to my REAL wall, so here's a link to the presentation a little belatedly





This year I'm looking to get more young people sending postcards, connecting up my hobby of sending and receiving post and my job in education, so you'll see more stuff happening over on www.schoolswaps.net as well as here on my REAL wall

In my day job as an e-learning advisor at Roehampton university, my role is to advise lecturers on the best technology to use for teaching their subjects. Most the time this is something electronic, for example a forum or a blog, or a video camera, but sometimes the best technology is the most basic and I never draw the line at electronic learning tools.



This term I was asked by a lecturer to suggest the ideal tool for getting students to express their feelings about an event that happened to them at school when they were younger. I wanted for the students to be able to reflect on this experience and to use whatever they had to hand to express how the event made them feel, without fear of criticism.

For me, postcards have been an ideal vehicle for learning to express myself. The almost-anonymous nature of postcards (you choose whether to sign them or not) and the idea that the recipient is separated from us by time and distance has this effect of freeing the artist to express themselves in a way that real-time social media and face-to-face interactions can't, yet it still reaches out and makes a connection. For some applications, like Postsecret, this is perfect, and so I decided to suggest postcards for this project.



The idea is for students to illustrate on 5 6x4 inch postcards an experience or series of experiences which happened to them in school that they can remember. After they have done so, they will send these images in to their lecturer and share the experiences if they wish.

This idea came from a lesson I taught while I was schools, and so I showed pictures from this to the students and postcards which have been sent by you to my REAL wall to illustrate what kinds of stories you could tell using the limited size of a postcard.



I volunteered to introduce the postcard picture story project to the students and on Tuesday and Thursday, I went in to the classroom to present to 2 sets of classes, starting with an introduction to my REAL wall and human-human communications in the digital age and moved on to tales of teaching from my past, finally ending up on the task at hand, which was the creation of the 5 picture stories.

The students were really excited at the prospect of sending post and the talks seemed to go down really well. I was asked by the students for some tips on how to get into sending post and I recommended Postcrossing as a good place to start as well as of course, looking on the sidebar of my REAL wall for some great postal folk. In addition, I've added a link to my article "How to make your mailbox more interesting" in the sidebar, so if anyone does want more than bills in their postbox next week, why not give it a read.



Looking forward to seeing what delights the students produce and if I get permission I will stick some of the best right up here on this site.

When I was at school, I used to love writing stories until the day that I wrote a literary criticism of Macbeth for English literature, in which I drew parallels with the Ninja clans of ancient Japan. My English teacher ripped it to pieces verbally and I never wrote again. Perhaps I'll make a mailart piece about that some day...

I've been way behind on posting, but had a deadline on this one as it's bad luck to leave your Christmas cards up after Twelfth Night.

Happy new year!

As 2011 draws to a close, Andy and Elena want to wish all the readers and contributors to my REAL wall a HAPPY 2012!

Lately, my artistic output has ground to a halt as I've taken time to settle in to the new place. Since Dewi came over in October, I've taken up cooking, hence why this shot is taken in the kitchen. Elena kindly decorated the kitchen for me with her favourite postcards, which are classics, rather than the new ones that we've been receiving.

Hope you can all join me in the new year. See you in the post!