Daryl Brown

Passages art project

Staying Connected Artist

Daryl Brown

Completed July 2006

Even though I love receiving letters, I rarely sit down to write a letter and mail it and because of this I rarely receive them. These days, I stay connected by phone and by email. Those I stay connected with are mainly family and a very few old, close friends. These are the people near and dear to my heart.

What comes to me via the old U.S. mail are usually bills and unwanted junk mail impersonal stuff.So when I looked at the idea of staying connected and the mail box sitting in front of me, it no longer represented the means of connecting.

For me staying connected with the people I love and care about comes from the heart and mind and memory and is communicated through shared thoughts and feelings and acts of love.

So, when I looked at the mailbox, I knew I was going to dismantle it and create something else out of it. I happened to be playing with papier-mache one day and created a pair of lips. I had set them down on top of the mailbox and all of a sudden, I had the idea of making faces out of the ends of the mailbox and making hands and hearts out of the rest of the mailbox. I decided to make two people holding hands and sharing hearts and reaching out to others to symbolize staying connected. I figure it would be universally understood.

How it was made: I had a friend strip the paint off the mailbox for me and I dismantled the mailbox by drilling holes where it was riveted. The door and the back wall became faces and I cut the all of the pieces of metal from the curving body of the mailbox to make the hands, the hearts, and the eyes, brows, noses, and mouths. I used tin snips and a dremel tool to smooth the sharp edges.

I didnt like the cold greyness of the metal and couldnt decide on a paint color so I decided to add warmth to the pieces by rusting the large pieces of metal. I rusted the faces and hands with muriatic acid scary but effective stuff. I glued on the hearts and the features of the faces and added glass pieces to the eyes. I decided to hang the pieces from dowels to get the spacing I wanted. The dowels have been lightly painted with watercolor to add a slight pattern to the unfinished wood. The pieces are hung on nylon line.

The piece should be hung against a wall and not left to hang as a mobile so the faces and hands are always facing out to the viewer.

Hope you enjoy my staying connected piece.