Malcolm Gorrill
Northern News Services

Inuvik (July 27/01) - The postal system holds special meaning for some people.

Take Stephanie Burchell and Sandra St-Laurent, for instance. The Whitehorse residents both practise mail art, in which artists send submissions through the mail in answer to the announcement of a given project.

Sandra St-Laurent, in back, offers some tips to Tara Katinka Waldmann. St-Laurent and her partner, Stephanie Burchell, held a mail art workshop during the Great Northern Arts Festival. - Malcolm Gorrill/NNSL photo

Burchell and St-Laurent held a workshop on mail art during last week's Great Northern Arts Festival. They also had a large exhibit of submissions they received for a project organized last year.

They received support for the project from the Yukon Millennium Celebration Fund, and chose the theme of migrations. Burchell said migrations seems appropriate for the North, as animals and people are always moving about.

The migrations project attracted 81 submissions from across Canada and the United States. Many came from the Yukon.

St-Laurent said mail art started in the 1960s with a list of artists gathered by one person, and over time the list has grown.

It began as a sort of revolution against art as a commodity, where juries pick some art for an exhibit, and not others, added Burchell. Mail art, she said, is different.

"You don't get your work back, but everything that's received is exhibited."

Artists do get something back, however, whether it's a catalogue of submissions for that exhibit or another piece of art.

Burchell said anyone can start up a mail art project by just calling for submissions on a given theme. She said the first exhibit she took part in was a project in Montreal based on the motherhood theme. Burchell sent off her artwork and eventually forgot all about it.

"Five or six months later I got this piece of photocopied paper in the mail that had the Mother Project, all these participants from all over the world, and my name," Burchell said.

Better still, the exhibit was displayed nearby. "I was able to go out and see the whole exhibition, and that was neat," Burchell said.

The Web site for the Migrations Project is www.geocities.com/migrations_mailart