There’s a lot going on in this post, and I should probably delete this sentence. I’m working on being concise, so these disclaimers are really counterproductive. I chose a word to describe the past two years. It’s a compound word, and it’s sort of hovering over perfect in the cartoon barometer I see in my mind right now: postcard.
Oliva Pritzker published a black and white version of selections of my postcards from China (<—see the process and a bit of the trip) in 2018 for a travel anthology she created while we were grad students at Otis College of Art & Design (Los Angeles) in the MFA Writing program.
In the spirit of traveling and translation and drawing and writing and publishing and postcards –the a lot I conceded in sentence one– the space of this post is to skip (a bit like a beginner’s-luck-stone that goes farther than expected but still plops) into the world of Graphic Design.
I make good decisions often, but the best one I can think of is applying to MFA Graphic Design program at Otis (though I was half way through the MFA Writing program there).
I worked with people from all over the world in that program. Many from China. I was excited to have some IRL frame of reference to their home country because of my travels.
I graduated from the MFA Graphic Design program in August 2019, just as the Hong Kong protests began. The territory looks much different now, on the news, than it did when I had been there.
I’ve started writing postcards to the people I met throughout the past few years in grad school.
The format of the postcard balances public and private, image and text, form and function, and author and audience in a limited space.
The China postcards had tourist-aimed photography of the streets, parks, and people of Beijing, Macau, Kowloon, and Hong Kong.
I’m using My grad school gratitude postcards have photos of earth from space, reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog I learned about in school. Maybe I’ll write “Thank you!” in bubble letters on the back of them.
Lorna Phone 