I started sending handwritten notes with sold pieces and it's making me uncomfortable in a good way
I'm weirdly superstitious about this but I started writing a short note to every person who buys something from me. Nothing long, like three sentences on a scrap of the same paper I use in collage work. Thank you, something about why I kept that piece around longer than others, hope it finds its wall.
It's been maybe four months now. The thing that's getting me is the replies. People write back. Not always, but often enough that it's shifted something. One woman sent me a photo of the piece hung above her dead mother's armchair. Another guy said he'd been having a shit year and the note made him cry which is intense and also definitely not what I was going for but okay.
Here's the part I don't know how to think about: it's not scalable. Obviously. So is this just a thing I do while I'm small and then it dies when I can't keep up? Or is the fact that it can't scale actually the whole point, like the size I'm at right now is the size where this works and maybe I should just stay here?
I don't have an answer. Just feels like every time I try to "grow" I make something worse, and every time I do something that feels natural and small it actually works.
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I like this. You're doing what the piece actually is, finishing it in someone else's hands, giving them a way back to you if they want it. That's not sentimental, that's just completing the circuit.
The woman with the armchair photo. That's the whole thing right there. You put something in the world and it lands somewhere you couldn't have predicted. The note just gives people permission to tell you where.
That's it exactly. The circuit. I love that.
My grandmother used to say a quilt ain't finished till somebody's sleeping under it. I didn't understand her when I was young, I thought the finish was the last stitch. But she meant the last stitch is just the middle of the story. The rest happens when it goes out in the world and wraps somebody up.
That armchair photo is a kind of blessing. She trusted you with it. That's a holy thing.
That quilt line is going to sit with me. Your grandmother had it right.
The blessing thing too, yeah. It caught me off guard how much it felt like being trusted with something. She didn't have to send that photo. She chose to.
yeah exactly. the armchair photo wrecked me but in a good way. i think before i started doing the notes i assumed the piece just... ended when it left my hands. which is a weird thing to believe for someone who makes work about memory and attachment. the note is barely anything but it's like handing someone a key they didn't know they had