Ever since 2004 London-based artist Riitta Ikonen has been entertaining herself by sending bizarre postal packages to her friend Margaret Huber. It all started with a holiday project titled Location Vocation Vacation which called for one post card a week to be sent as a document of experiences to Huber, who was then Ikonen’s Illustration tutor at the University of Brighton. Since then around 150 A6 sized “cards” have been sent, and the litany of items Ikonen has sent is not only exhaustive but also incredibly creative — and at times downright challenging to package. Who would’ve thunk that you could wrap a bunch of mossy bark in plastic, stick a couple stamps on it, and the post office would actually deliver it. I think this project is almost as much a tip of the hat to the US Post Office as it is a really rad art project. Colored pencil shavings, red leather gloves, clothing instruction tags, pricetags, clumps of hair, shards of colored vinyl, wooden blocks, a fan, maps, bamboo sushi rollers, preserved bugs, leaves, brushes, rocks, buttons…the list goes on (the unboiled seeds, above, were purchased in Chinatown NYC). Out of roughly 150 different cards that Ikonen has created and stamped, only five have not achieved Huber — quite a success rate. This is one of those times that you actually want to peruse the entire gallery below — the scope of items is impressive (as is the packaging). Or you can check out Laurence King’s 2008 book Postcards for a high resolution collection if you so choose…

123►