The Viola Arnold Memorial Postcard Project

After my mother died I decided to continue sending daily postcards in her memory. Each of her 11 closest relatives (2 children, 3 children-in-law, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild) got a month of postcards. My sister, who had been Mom’s daily caregiver, got two months of cards. At the end of each month, I asked the recipient to send a postcard to a friend in memory of Mom.

While Mom was happy to receive random cards and messages, I thought I needed a little more intellectual rigor in what I sent to other family members – after all, who but a mother could sustain interest over a period of years in what her darling fixed for dinner? So I decided to have a theme every month.

January’s theme was “Art By People I Know.” February’s was “The World (Book) of the 70s.” I have a set of World Books bought in the 70s when my kids were little -- and what is so obsolete as a 30-year-old hard-copy encyclopedia? I decided I was willing to cannibalize it for art, and found 28 articles on old technology, current events that had yet to be upended by history, and downright dumb things, like the lavishly illustrated and totally imaginary depiction of interplanetary space travel, which would be happening any day now, or so the World Book said.

March was called “Room and Board,” a collection of old cards from hotels, motels and restaurants.

In April, however, I fastened on a new approach, which took vigorous root and, I think it’s safe to say, changed my life as an artist. That approach was to start carrying my camera on my daily walks, in search of photos for the monthly theme. April’s theme was “Pathetic Landscaping,” and it turned out to be easier than one might hope to find 30 really striking examples! Those cards went to my brother-in-law, an avid gardener whose own landscaping is the antithesis of pathetic.

So what was so life-changing about this perfectly ordinary concept? I learned that my style of photography is not to search for beauty or grandeur – it’s to look for and document small themes and ironies in ordinary surroundings. Four weeks of keeping an eye out for pathetic landscaping, for instance, made me notice how many people in one part of town chose the same lawn ornament.

The six-year postcard project

On January 3, 2003, I had a good idea. I would do a “performance art” project in which I would send my mother a postcard every day for the year. Wasn’t it a bit late to start a daily art project on January 3, you might ask? Well, yes, except when you make up projects you get to make up the rules. I had been in Virginia to see my mother for the holidays and had just gotten home, so my rules were that I didn’t have to send a card on a day that I had seen her in person.

The project turned out to be a big hit both with Mom and with me. I enjoyed finding cards that I thought she would like, and she liked getting a lot of mail! The cards didn’t say anything really memorable –one from an uneventful day might report on the weather, what was happening in the garden, and what we had for dinner. But it was a way to keep in touch, and the cards were permanent; Mom could go through them as often as she wanted, reread the messages and look at the photos.

When it got close to Christmas Mom started dropping hints that she was sure going to miss the postcards when the year was over, and it became apparent to me that my one-year performance art project was going to be a lifetime endeavor. I sent her a card every day I didn’t see her for almost six years, until she died in December 2008.

At the beginning of the project I thought maybe I would make fancy cards, along the lines of the fabric postcards that some fiber artists send. But it didn’t take long for that idea to hit the skids. For one thing, it took too long to make. For another, it cost more to send anything thicker than card weight, or with loose embellishments. And most important: Mom really liked plain old commercial tourist picture postcards the best. She and my father had traveled widely in the day, and many of the cards showed places she had been.

Sometimes I would cut out an interesting photo or clipping from the newspaper and paste it to the card. Often I sent cards from art exhibits. After I got a small photo printer for a birthday present, I could print out my own pictures onto 4 x 6 index cards, the perfect size for mailing. I bought postcards voraciously whenever we traveled, and haunted flea markets, particularly one in Floyd VA where I could buy vintage cards for 25 cents (cheaper than I could get a lot of new postcards). Best of all, many of my friends helped feed my postcard habit, sending me cards from their collections or purchased on their own vacations.

Sometimes we had themes, like a week of birds or a week of flowers. Once we had a full month of cards from New Zealand; several times I cut up old Christmas cards to postcard size and sent them in December.

When Mom died I discovered that not only did I miss her terribly but I missed sending the postcard every day. There were only a couple of weeks left in the year but that was long enough for me to realize that I wasn’t ready to give up the performance art project. So on January 1, 2009 I started the Viola Arnold Memorial Postcard Project, which lasted a year. While the original postcard project was totally loose, the Memorial Project had more structure. I’ll write about that in a subsequent message.

Mom kept all the cards over the years. At the start of the project I made her a couple of fabric boxes in which to keep the cards, but they were soon outgrown. I have all the cards now but haven’t been able to go through them yet. Eventually I should be able to reconstruct six years of my own life in excruciatingly boring detail!

This was a particularly beautiful bowl of soup that made a nice postcard.