Wreck This Journal (by US Postal Mail!) Project Contribution from Amy Kiessling!

[Minneapolis Gnome]

Amy Kiessling's contribution to the Wreck This Journal (by US Postal Mail!) arrived this week and it's wild, energetic, bright, creative and cool!

On page 50 she uses staples, string, 4 colors of washi tape, tiny golden arrow tape, domestic mail labels with thick black marker graffiti, a hole punch and (hand carved?) rubber stamps of a spiral, flower and triangle to "Make a Mess, Don't Clean it up."  This page makes me think of a PARTY playing loud, fun music where everyone is feeling free, funky, happy and their creativity is completely off the leash!

You'll see the after party, on the back of page 50, is black and white themed with more black marker and mailing labels with black marker on them.  I just imagined a conga line around the staples!

I love what she did about page 58's instructions to "Cut through several layers".  I don't know WHAT I would have done if given that prompt, but she grabbed it by the horns and had a very awesome take on it.  You'll see she has real woven fabric attached to the page, shows us what kind of fabric it is and made scissors to augment the work!  I really like these scissors, they're  drawn on slightly thicker paper, colored in and even have a tiny screw drawn in.  They remind me of household scissors from the 1940s.  

On page 59 Amy seems to invite us to smell with our eyeballs, and it works!  It also makes me want to eat 2 or 3 juicy grapefruits and oranges.  It's a clever way to convey smell visually so that we can all see it over the internet together!

Page 60 is fun, she's pasted colors outside of the shape and sealed them down.  I like her use of colored pencils, and how she made a snail out of a watercolor wheel and green washi / masking tape!

Our artist makes page 61 her own by altering the prompt to be what she wants to create from it, which we get to see throughout her contributed pages.  Her take is colorful, abstract and friendly - what you cannot see from the photo is that if you run your finger along the green arrows you feel a striped texture which might be from the paint brush strokes made on the paper before it was cut into arrow shapes.  The brown circle - like shape has a similar texture under the fingertip, but it's more subtle.

The back of page 61 excites my imagination as I try to picture wallpaper covering a room with bunnies like this.  It's eyeball excitement!  Page 62 is filled with notes from front and back!

I like these POCKET LISTS and NOTES!  On my solo WTJ I have glued in and documented lint from a few pockets but I've got to say that I like Amy's alteration to the prompt more!  On the rare occasions I have found notes out in the wild, like grocery lists from already-gone shoppers in shopping carts, I find them as exciting as a kid finding a clue in a mystery, they're interesting and feel like I'm getting to see a little secret part of an anonymous person's life.  I'm very excited by them.

I can't end this blog without sharing her green-blue abstract envelope:

It reminds me of graffiti art, or an urban mural covering a large wall.  It feels like jazz music put into a visual piece to me.  She's got a darn nice artistamp on there too!

Thank you so much for collaborating to wreck this journal, Amy!  Your pages are great! 

It is so exciting and fun to do this project and get the artists pages back in the mail.  I'm looking forward to blogging more contributions and also putting all of them back between the original covers so everyone can enjoy seeing the creation in it's entirety!

[Amy Kiessling]

Thank you for posting MG! It was so fun to see the pages on here and I loved reading your great commentary.