RECEIVED: Mail-Art Vispo Roundup from Karen Champlin (Highland Park, Illinois, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail-art by IUOMA member Karen Champlin (Highland Park, Illinois, USA)

 

June 14, 2011 - Within the last few days, Bifidus Jones (Minnesota, USA) blogged a new piece of mail-art by Karen Champlin entitled "The Nascent Conspiracy." Erni Baer (Hamburg, Germany) received a similar piece. Today I was thrilled to find similar work from Karen in my mailbox.

 

She is a master of visual-verbal forms. Her work is constantly evolving. These recent pieces bring interesting text fragments to the forefront as part of vispo overlays that reference earlier pieces but are far more organic in terms of composition. 

 

Blue masking tape is also prominent in the work above: Karen has been integrating that material I used in my "blue tape" series last year. I'm really touched that she even remembers those pieces and has integrated them with hers. This is certainly one of the things that makes mail-art special. Here's the reverse side of the postcard-size art she sent me:

 

Trying to get my Karen Champlin archive in order, I found another asemic talisman she sent several months ago. I blogged one example, and that can be found by clicking into my postings about her tagged at the bottom of this blog. Here's another bearing some tremendous symbols she created:

 

This one looks like an ancient and mysterious artifact. Many IUOMA members will probably recall this series by Karen. The vispo overlays have more contrast here. I believe Karen uses stamps originally made for use in a business, and they strike me as having an industrial-era quality. She has made excellent use of them in numerous vispo pieces. I'm very pleased indeed my collection includes all different types of work by Karen, documenting her evolution. The envelope for the asemic talisman was great and continued the blue tape theme!

 

And the usual suspect:

 

As always, many thanks Karen!

[De Villo Sloan]

I'm glad to connect with her again too. She's always doing something with the verbal-visual - always pushing ahead.

[cheryl penn]

Thanks DVS - so nice to see Karen's work out here again :-)