Later on this month, Elena and I are heading to Paris with Positively Postal and Katerina to meet Mim and Chuck. We are all mailartists and met through sending post to each other, and we're going to meet up and make mailart together. We can hardly wait and have already booked a place to stay together.

But even before I get there, I've already got a little treat from Chuck in the form of Chucks REAL wall! Here's his message...

Bonjour from Paris!
My Real Wall!

Just wanted to thank you all for sending mail-art to me in Paris!

What a nice surprise to return from our Bilbao trip to find a deluge of mail-art
correspondence completely filling my mailbox.

A special thank you to my friend Katerina, who sent me my first piece of mail-art in Paris
It started a chain of mail to post on my wall in our atelier--I've attached a photo of
my growing collection for you to see.

Also, many thanks Erni for sending me the awesome Spiegelman book--he's one of my favorites!

After we return to our home in Richmond, Virginia, I will respond with mail-art to all of you also.

Sending you best regards,

Chuck (aka Charl-Benoit in Paris)

PS:
Check out my blog of photo images I've gleaned from the streets of Paris and Bilbao.
myurbanfragments.blogspot.com

Also, my website is: www.chuckscalin.com

Gosh what a year 2012 has been and it's barely started!

Already this month, I've taken 4 mailart-related lectures, with another one scheduled tomorrow. Tomorrows talk is part of a big event i'm helping to run at Roehampton university called Teachmeet, where teachers come and share ideas on teaching. Everyone gets 7 minutes to talk about anyidea they've used in class, and I'll be talking about how students at our university used postcards to keep in touch during school experience while teacher training, an initiative I led last year. I'm pretty nervous, as usual, but I'm sure it will go fine.

How is this all related to this wall you may be wondering. Well that postcard in the middle (Getting into Literacy) came from another teacher, @jodieworld, who ran the last Teachmeet I was at, where I talked about my educational postcard project Schoolswaps. I talked about how we still need the postal service despite all these advances in technology, then managed to forget my USB stick in her computer. This postcard accompanied the USB stick in the post, which neatly proves my point.

That lovely pic of a happily married couple comes from my best friend at University, Jay, and shows him and his wife, who really is just perfect for him. Me and Elena went to see them last Wednesday as it was my birthday and we went go-karting, which was great fun.

In the right hand corner you can see a runner drawn by Dewi when he came to stay at our house and went walking in Richmond Park. His eye was caught by the strange hand position of this bearded runner and made him his 365th piece in Mailart365, which he then gave to me by hand in my house, from Canada via Tuscany. now THAT'S dedication! Wish you could join us in France Dewi!

Next to that is the 2nd 365 by Katerina Nikoltsou. She actually got to 365 and sent it to me, but I didn't get it as she'd put the wrong number on the envelope. So they sent it back to her. Meanwhile she made an exact replica of her 365th piece and sent me that instead. That arrived to me and the other arrived back in Greece. Not wanting me to miss out, she sent me that one too, so i can now say I own 2 #365s from Katerina. Yay!

A couple of weeks ago I presented a lecture to some students at the university where I work on the use of postcards as an expressive tool for an assignment they were to be set.

The idea was that the students were going to create 5 postcards on which they were to tell of 5 incidents that stand out in their memory from their school days.

After introducing my REAL wall and talking about postcards in schools and how they had been used to tell stories from my experience, the students were asked to create their first ones and bring them in this week. This is by the first class and there are some cracking stories here!

The class was such a pleasure to attend. When the students came in, they dropped their cards into a "postbox" by the door. This mean that the students could remain anonymous if they wished. The lesson commenced and halfway through the lesson the students took a break, during which time the postcards were all put up on the board as you see them here.

On the return from their break, I took the students and we took a look at the postcards submitted. Students were asked to look at the postcards and discuss what they thought each one meant and if they related to any of them. They were told that they didn't need to say which was theirs if they didn't want to, but pretty soon we had explanations coming in from every student about what their postcards represented. It was GREAT! There were so many experiences, and so many nods from people who had been there.

In the flickr version of this photo (which you get to by simply clicking on the photo), I've done my best to recall which stories went with which, so if you hover over the images you'll be able to read the stories. If you don't read the stories, do just enjoy the images and ask yourself what they may mean.

At the moment the students are collecting these images up on a class blog, which is private, and at the end we hope to put on a little show, which should be a real gem. It would be really nice for teachers to be able to see the sorts of memories that the children go away from school with. I will also ask the students to upload any images they want to share with readers of my REAL wall so that they can share their experiences with you directly. You all have a treat in store believe me!

A little note for the Thursday group - I'm so sorry I didn't manage to get a photo of the wall at the end of the lesson as I was chatting and by the time I remembered the postcards had all gone! :-(

At the end of last year, I teamed up with a UK charity called Escape Artists, with whom I helped run a postcard show called "A good day looks like..."

The show was part of a conference called "Plays The Thing", which was about exploring creative approaches to wellbeing, and so we asked for people to consider what a good day looked like in the spirit of exploring and expressing creatively what wellbeing meant to them.

This was a particularly interesting show for me, because among other things, Escape Artists do a lot of work with prisoners and young people, so this show had many contributions from people I don't often see in my postbox.

Can you guess which ones were done by prisoners, which by children and which were done by mainstream artists?

I didn't manage to get too many photos on the days the conference was on of the photos on display, but here are the 2 photos I took on my phone of all the postcards up on display at the conference





I'm looking forward to working more with Escape Artists in future and hope to use the post to bring people together, regardless of their backgrounds

All the images can be seen in all their glory on my flickr site, where I lovingly scanned and archived them. I'll add descriptions when I get a chance.

"Why the long delay between REAL walls at the moment?" you may be wondering. The answer is really simple. Winter.

Our present house is rented, which means we can't just stick up willy-nilly as we did in our own house previously, as the adhesive we use, Blu-tac, sometimes rips off the paintwork and we would rather like our deposit back.

So the wall I've chosen as my main REAL wall is in the conservatory, and most of your postcards are opened then put in the conservatory in an ever-expanding pile waiting for it to be warm enough for me to bear to go out and stick them up on the wall. December and January have been WAY too cold for my pathetic little body to take, not to mention the winter hibernation, but this weekend was finally warm enough to get some postcards on the walls.

The large painting is a long-overdue posting which came from Clohn Art to me while I was still at my old address. The reason it's taken so long to go up on the wall is that I thought it was so good, I couldn't help but take it into work, where it's been next to my desk for the last 4 months. Check out the Clohn art site, where you can pick up a sample of trash art for bargain basement prices.

The 4th wasp in Cornpone's series is next to that, and those pieces are joined by some of my favourite mailartists of all, JJ, Heleen (complete with Postcrossing stamps! Yay) and Katerina Nikoltsou, who I will be seeing next month in Paris as part of the Mim mailart meetup.

Other gems on the wall come from Kerri Pullo, Mim and Hope, whose Keep writing project is well worth the asking price on Etsy I can tell you.

Thanks to everyone on the wall for contributing your fabulous art and post from all over the world as ever.

If any mailartists do happen to be in Paris in Mid-October, do drop me a line, as I'd love for Mims mailart meet to be HUGE!