Fi Webster's photos

Address label & Bride of Frankenstein by Danielle Maret Pierce-Williams. Goddess by Julie Elizabeth. Dr. Mandala by C. T. Chew. Pisceana by yours truly. Camera by Franticham. Dangerous Mail Art label by Gina Visione. Deco tape from Laughing Elephant. Letters on back from StickerBomb's alphabet book. The cheese sticker is actually fluorescent orange.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Left-over Bits." The bird is a scarlet ibis, the national bird of Trinidad. Its color comes from the red crustaceans it eats. Tattooed man from a 19th century French medical textbook: I guess medical publishers in those days weren't above including an occasional gee-whiz picture! I wish I knew where the man originally came from, but I don't. Also: mysterious Spanish text, washi tape, rubber stamp, and photo of water from Discover magazine.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Left-over Bits." Background from Juxtapoz (an art magazine). Winged figure from Design Toscano catalog. Words from a book on the circus. Person in chains from an early 20th century poster for an escape artist, with head from Barbie doll catalog. Green thing from a photo of a sculpture (circa 2010). Boy it feels good to get these old scraps off my work table!

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Circus." When I was a little kid (late 1950s, early 1960s) and my family took car trips across the U.S., we would see signs for roadside attractions. First there'd be a cryptic sign next to the side of the road saying just "Alligators." Then a thousand yards further, there'd be one saying "Cold Pop." And so on, until the final one told you what road to get off on, to buy stuff and see the show. These roadside attractions often included a "Flea Circus." Like all kids, I was fascinated by tiny things, so I really wanted to see what a flea circus was: were the fleas actually trained, or did they just jump around with small toy animals and trapezes and stuff so it looked sort of like a circus? Or were they actually dead, and glued to the little objects? I couldn't figure out how the fleas could be alive, without a real animal to bite. Well, I never saw a flea circus, so I have no idea. If you've seen one, please tell me! In the ring is the familiar cat flea, which also lives on dogs and humans. I'm not going to tell you what all the audience members are: they're just a bunch of beetles, bugs, flies, etc.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Circus." What's a circus without sideshow attractions? Starting in the lower left and going clockwise, you're looking at female conjoined twins, a bearded woman, a half-woman, a fat woman, a woman with no arms, your standard big guy & little guy combo (that's an adult man standing between the giant's legs) and an unfortunate fellow who has a partial conjoined twin hanging off his chest. Don't these people look like they were cast members in Tod Browning's "Freaks" (1932)? That's a superb flick, if you haven't seen it.

Cut-paper collage postcard. The French sentence, "Parfois le rire de Dada fait pousser une chimère," means "Sometimes Dada's laugh makes a chimera grow." (A chimera is a mythical beast composed of three different creatures.) Foot is that of a Rüppell's vulture ( Gyps rueppellii ), resident of the African plains. Middle section is the stinky part of a wild arum ( Arum maculatum ), related to the famous giant corpse flower. The human ( Homo sapiens ) is from a 1950s ad by Clipper Craft men's clothes for their "Mr. Cool" suit. Speech bubble is from Haunted comics.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for the "Un-Color" swap I hosted on swap-bot. I chose brown as my un-color—from the palest brown of computer punch cards, faded newspaper, and old bone, to the tan of paper bags and corrugated cardboard, to siena, chestnut, and the darkest sepia. The title is a slogan of the United Parcel Service.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Homage to Richard Hamilton." Richard Hamilton is best known for this collage . I decided to take this theme in a slightly darker direction, to at least put some Angst into it. =laugh= Background paper from Luxe Paperie. Interior from a 1960 magazine ad for Knoll textiles. Diving bodies from a 1959 ad for Kellogg's Corn Soya cereal (which looks disgusting). Man's head from a comic book called G. I. Sweethearts . Woman's head from a comic book called Adventures into the Unknown . Text from a 1959 ad for Pepsi-Cola. (It's amazing how much inane text magazine ads used to have.) ______________________________________

Cut-paper collage postcard. Background paper from Luxe Paperie. The spotted owl is native to conifer forests in the North American west to northwest. My husband Bob, who is an ecosystem biologist, chose the pteranodon stamp, saying, "It's good to remind people that an owl is a living pteranodon."

"Mail Art 2013" stamp by Danielle Maret Pierce-Williams. Kurt Vonnegut stamp by the incomparable WackyStuff. Paper tape by 7 Gypsies. Air mail sticker from Laughing Elephant. Letters of "GENA" from StickerBomb's alphabet book. That picture is not from an actual moon landing. It's a still from the James Bond flick "Diamonds are Forever," for which they created a moon landing set (fake, in the plot) for Sean Connery—dressed in perfectly tailored suit and tie, of course—to run around on.

Cut-paper collage postcard inspired by the work of Peter Blake—an artist best known for the Beatle's Sergeant Pepper album cover. Blake has a penchant for 4 X 4 arrays. So, honoring his pop themes and primary colors, I made a 4 X 4 array of my own. And I finally got my idol, Patti Smith, into a collage—yay! (She's in the lower left corner.)

Made with Cavallini carte postale paper and 7 Gypsies paper tape. I should add that all these envelopes have loooong letters on the inside. (This one was 14 pages.) If you're a long-letter-type correspondent, drop me a line: maybe we can get a correspondence going!

This is from the same Taschen article on a Gustav Klimt mural as the previous envie.

I would never have thought that Marsden Hartley would go with Gustav Klimt, but it just about does, doesn't it?

Karen's into indie rock, so I made her an envelope with front covers of British independent music zines. Artistamps by Anna Banana (bananas), C. T. Chew (Man Ray), and Chris Lockwood (robot). "Beware of Mail Artists" sticker from Gina V. Check out the names of those punk bands! How often do you see the words "gonads" and "glue" right next to each other? Oh, and the stickers "Approach Slowly" & "Homemade" are not pink, but rather the fluorescent orange that doesn't scan.

Cut-paper collage postcard. Is there a collage artist who doesn't love Joseph Cornell? The things that have always struck me about his work are: boxes within boxes, asymmetry, star charts, circles, spheres, glass objects containing things, and of course, birds. The bird is a Black-Billed Barbet ( Lybius guifsobalito ), native to East Africa. The upper left box contains 19th century mineral specimens. The lower left is from an educational chart about development of ants: it's an ant in its egg.

This one is just me playing around with some of the blue pieces I pulled for the last collage. In an ideal world the big rectangle with the fish wouldn't be tipped: that's what I get for aligning it by eye instead of measuring. The title is from William James, something that popped into my head while I was working on this. The girl is from a photograph by Jonathan Torgovnik. This one was mailed to someone in the Super Mail Artists group...