Postcards

In 2009 my zines were featured in an exhibition at the MCA, Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World. As well as a copy of every zine I had made up until that point, there was also a stack of postcards for people to write me notes on, and a smart red postbox to deposit them in.

I collected hundreds of postcards over the two months of the exhibition. At home I sorted them into categories: random, I like, advice, travellers, kids, confessions, my day, hate, praise, berry, art criticism, pictures, pairs, coincidences (streetlights), angst, people I know, MCA, how are you, propositions, Jesus, pairs, icecream, requests for correspondence, postcards, drawings of penises, other languages, cats, quotes.

I enjoy sorting things. I started off using a 70s orange index box but there were too many cards to fit into it. Now they live on my bookshelf in two piles, flagged with little pink slips that divide the sections.

Many people asked me, at the time, what I was going to do with them. Beyond sorting them out, I didn’t know. Maybe just reading them was enough – I don’t like the idea that everything has to be for a project, or needs to be repurposed into something public in order to be important. I didn’t want to make a zine out of them, which was perhaps the obvious end, but now I think a good thing to do with them is to feature some selected postcards here. Most I can’t trace to their author, so if by some wonderful chance you find your confession or list of favourite things here, let me know.