Hello and welcome to Going Postal!

Going Postal is an experiment following the disregarded elements of the everyday advertising that is so pervasive in our lives. The junk mail and spam that we receive through our doors and email accounts that we instantly forget, yet at the same time come to know as part of the visual make up of our lives.

In 2007 BLOC Space in Sheffield invited me to draw on all 500 envelops they were using for their annual BLOCassembly mail out. If you have received one of these drawings please feel free to use them in whatever way you wish. Like the legion of images we are sent through junk mail and spam these are yours now, to do what you want with. But please feel free to contact me at paulstanley66@yahoo.co.uk and share your thoughts and your own creative responses.

If you are not on the BLOC mailing list you can also contact me at the email above and I’ll send you your own Going Postal drawing through the post.

What is Going Postal?

My work has always looked at notions of mass production and the dissemination of imagery. Through [deletia] I created artist´s multiples, mass produced images that were distributed in the advertising spaces of magazines and other publications. Most of us, if we think of the art that has most touched us, are in fact thinking of reproductions we have experienced in books, magazines and on TV. Through [deletia] I, and the other artists involved, wanted to create artworks that were found in these medias and that gave each and every viewer a first hand experience of the art.

While working on [deletia] I became interested in both the scale and repetition of images in print advertising. Even an advert in a relatively small arts publication is reproduced around 30,000 times and read, they estimate, by something like 90,000 people. This means that even if the advert is only successful in keeping the attention of, say, 10 percent of those who see it then it has still reached 9,000 viewers.

The inspiration for Going Postal came from the junk mail that would get stuffed into my post box each morning. I wanted to see if I could, by hand, produce a series of artworks that could then be sent directly to viewers on a scale similar to junk mail and spam, rather than expecting them to come to me.

I want to see how many of my drawings will survive. How many of them will be used by others and how many will end up in the recycling. For me the responses of you, the viewer, are as important as my own experience in making Going Postal.

The plan is for Going Postal to evolve using your responses and eventually create a network of imagery flying around in the post.

So if you have received a Going Postal drawing please send me an image of what you do with it. And please keep an eye on this Blog spot as I aim to keep updating it with the images and comments that are sent to me as well as my own thoughts on the project.

All the best for now

PS

Paul Stanley is an artist and independent curator who has been involved in the development and running of artist led organisations in the UK such as Bankley Studios Gallery, Manchester and The View From Here, Glasgow.

In 2004 Stanley set up the art collaboration [deletia] which he now co-edits with Lynn Harris. [Deletia] purchase ad space in various magazines and use this space for the presentation, preservation and promotion of art. Piggy backing on existing platforms allows us to create non-linear, ahistoric reflections on visual culture. A collective and accumulative ‘snail-trail’ can be seen at www.deletia.org.uk.

Currently Stanley is working on Going Postal (http//pstanleygoingpostal.blogspot.com/) for BLOC in Sheffield, Corporate Colours for HKS in Bergen and is artist in residence with USF Verftet, also in Bergen. While staying in Norway Stanley will be building a Blogspot called Sitting in a Cafe and invites any Bergen based artists or curators to come share a coffee with him, talk about their ideas and get on the Blog.

email: paulstanley66@yahoo.co.uk