Forest of Artcards

At some point in my travels in the 1990s, I had a compulsion to make art during my travels. It had to come in a form compatible with the nature of my activities and ways I spent my time participating in conferences and touring. I conceived a project of making postcard size collages, a collaged card to mail back home to myself. Soon the other side of the card, the address and stamped side, became a secondary collage. I began the project officially in 1996 with the first artcard actually posted and returned to me bearing the imprint of a postal system. I came to call my collaged cards "artcards." I travelled to a location in the world and instead of buying a postcard to write home, I made a postcard by collaging various found elements from the location using glue sticks, colored pens and pencils to finish them, then posting them to myself before departure. As years past, I was amazed how many artcards began to accumulate, and even more amazed that not one was lost in the world wide mail systems, though I could see some irritation that postal officials must have experienced pushing my cards through their machines to stamp them. Several returned rather battered but not one unrepairable. In 2004 I had satisfied my compulsion and began using the cards to pursue other art forms, while retaining my vision that the final completion of the project would manifest in the future, that being each artcard encased in a frame or thick plastic protective cover, hanging by fish line from the ceiling, such that you walk into the installation room to see this forest of artcards, able to walk among them for a closer look at any of them.