Forwarded from the Arts and Healing Network Newsletter

Worldwide Letterboxing by Alec Finlay
by Mary Daniel Hobson, director, AHN

When I first read about Alec Finlay’s Worldwide Letterboxing project in the journal, PRACTICE, I was struck by how simple and yet wonder-filled this project is. Over the next few years, Alec is placing 100 wooden boxes, each containing a rubber stamp of a “circle poem” in various locations around the world. Each box has a keeper, who plants the box in nature, records its location, creates clues/map, and maintains the box. On his web site, you can find details of how to find each of these boxes and journey to them yourself, collecting the circle poems. ...[T]his artistic act shares with guerilla art both the transformation of one’s relationship to the public environment and the sense of art as a surprise, free gift.

In Alec’s own words,

Letterboxing is “hobby-walking, collecting, with a bit of printing thrown in. The letterboxes are like bird boxes and they protect a rubber stamp and ink pad…To me letterboxing is about shared consciousness as it invites people to be writers and readers…the journey is an exchange between the art of poetry and the act of walking, without either one of these being given priority. My poems are ‘rosebuds’: they may be beautiful or playful, but they are also simply an invitation to a journey. The guides are topographical descriptions, but, whether they are informative or chatty, they contain the texture of different people’s voices and the grain of their memories. The project may disrupt some people’s expectations of what a work of art should be, but any walk guided by a friend can have something magical about it... I want to put the poems into a state of use; to give them a home, but also place them within the rules of a game, a hiding-and-seeking, to enrich and deepen the arc of time.”

The quotes above are by Alec Finlay from an interview with Elizabeth James.

Arts & Healing Network newsletter (Dec. 2007/Jan. 2008)

Alec Finlay's Web site

   

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