“Transmission” will be an exhibition of combined works, made by three artists, using the postal and courier service. Currently, Susan Chancellor is making monoprints, watercolours and abstract pastel drawings, Phil Page is continuing his practice of large scale paintings of cognitive maps of cities and Susan Banks is making environmental weeds into dyes and weavings. The proposed show will include painting, textiles, monoprints, three dimensional work and drawings. The transmission of work by post and courier will be a large part of the exhibition, so we will include the physical evidence of that in the works.

We have started a process which we are keen to allow to evolve further. Coronavirus transmits only too easily; thoughts, feelings, social connections much less so. The last two years have seen us using all of our ingenuity to discourage the former and enable the latter. For eighteen months the three of us have been making work about the plague year and connecting through email, zoom and when possible person to person in order to stage an exhibition “A Journal of the Plague Year”.

Covid has disrupted our physical connections and interactions which are particularly important for artists such as ourselves. Electronic mediation, whilst helpful, cannot replace communication by bodily generated marks and physical substrates. Concerns of scale, true colour, materiality are lost. To overcome this, our plan is to use the post, commercial couriers and “Jackmail” (a community courier run for a young man with profound disabilities) to transmit work, ideas, artists marks and feelings to each other. And to work in various combinations on the same ground or substrate responding to each others’ marks.

In this we are reconnecting with the tradition of postal art which was popular in the1960s and 1970s. We are interested in transmitting the physical object since each of our practices is physical in nature, mono printing, dyeing, weaving and water based painting and drawing. As we work we are noticing how the first person to make the mark influences the outcome of the “conversation” even over several iterations of the process. And as artists in the first postal art movement, we plan to incorporate the physical detritus of the transport process into some of the finished works.