Missing You :: The Missing You Collective: Hilary Herrmann, Rene Bolten, Kellie O'Dempsey, Michelle Dawson
30 June - 29 July 2018
Gallery 5
Four artists, missing another, communicate with postcards: cut up, collaged, stitched, painted, drawn on...sent.
Four artists eagerly await the Postie to see what happens next...
Two years on this is their conversation.
The Missing You Collective began back in 2009 as The Drawing Group, a collective of artists comprised of Rene Bolten, Hilary Herrmann, Kellie O’Dempsey, James Cruickshank and Michelle Dawson.
The group was a response to the isolation artists often experience, working solo in their respective studios day in, day out. We would meet fortnightly to create collaboratively and when members travelled kept the connection alive with a mail art project. This involved sending each other postcards to alter, deface or react to in anyway the recipient saw fit, and to then send that postcard on to someone else in the group.
In 2015 when our dear cohort James Cruickshank died we re-initiated the Postcard project and re-named ourselves The Missing You Group, in honour of James and our missing of him.
The four of us have now been sending each other postcards for the last 18 months. The process involves selecting postcards to send each other, these can be recycled, new, kitsch, fine art, photographs, baggage labels, or drawings…the only criteria really is that it can be sent standard mail without an envelope!
On receiving a postcard the recipient then reacts in anyway they choose…cutting it up, soaking it in turps, adding or subtracting elements, collage, paint, biro, glitter, sandpaper even! Sometimes the action is elaborate, at other times it is a small decisive response.
The postcard is then sent on…until a recipient feels it is a resolved work. At this point that person withdraws the work from the circuit but must then replace it with a new postcard, and so on it goes. There are no rules about what makes a piece finished and there are no rules or order as to who the postcard it sent to. Sometimes a postcard volleys to and fro between two people in a conversation, others go round and round the circuit numerous times.
We currently have at least 100 works we feel are complete and envisage having between 200-300 to curate a show from by 2019. (As an aside this also means we could potentially be ready to exhibit at short notice if the need arose)
We intend to include a stop motion animation of the evolution and transformation of at least one card, and could potentially also have a slide presentation of all the works, including the backs of the postcards, as these are fascinating in their own rights.
We are also very touched by the enthusiasm with which the various regional Post Office workers have engaged with the project and would love to invite several of them to open the exhibition, should our proposal be successful.
