POSTCARDS FROM MENTAL STATES

Our collaborative project, Postcards From Mental States started by exchanging digital archives of travelling through America at times when we had both felt overwhelmed; a simple realisation that we tend to document difficult times in our lives. We create archives of ourselves to revise at a time when we are less overwhelmed. We know we are very easy to very easily overwhelmed. If whelm originally meant to overturn, then a vessel is implied here. To overwhelm is to over-repeat turn a vessel. Turning over an engine gets a motorboat started, and yet overturning a boat pauses or stops the boat in the water. Exchanging our personal archives felt like turning over an hourglass. The passage of sand back and forth and back and forth is a soothing and subtle reference to death. The pattern of sand grains runs on the hourglass . . . - Lewis & Hawkins “A collection of city scenes at once familiar and alien, out of focus and timeless, they capture the madness and the frenetic pace of a city’s wonder and menace all at once” - Len Germinara “The pages leap forward in the day-glo static of thought and collaboration, of conversation and creation; processing the overwhelming influx of information into a suite of captivating 21st-Century thought balloons.” - Derek Beaulieu “Here's a collaboration of extraordinary power value love sight poetry for you to see and read, to resee, that will be your eye for you. It's also beautiful, and off. It's better. Get this and you can't complain." - SJ Fowler “I loved how poetics are seemingly grown within this delicate and coherent work that enabled To undergo me complete rewiring of the Arc(hive)s” - Rushika Wick “When you add an oblique caption to an altered image, you add another degree of alterity. These Postcards give me a sense of a self split into a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit elsewhere at the same time.” - Tim Gaze “The words read like intercepted communiques, warped Zen Koans or the contents of dystopian fortune cookies. Put microworld of elliptical unease together, they frame a conjured by the alchemical negative gravity of two writers and artists at the top of their game.” - Tom Jenks