When I began studying Fine Art, and launched myself into conceptual art, all my frequent, extensive, and youthful travelling seemed to coalesce when I created my first postal work. Life and Art, and how they feed into each other seemed in synchrony.

In the first postal work, I posted letters to every place I had ever slept a night. I felt this was a way to touch base with all the geographically located experiences that I had gone through. In this way, I arrived at the locus point, that nexus where everything comes together: geography, emotion, and movement.

Mail Art has served as a curative. Like a quest, it has me exploring continents, including places I will never go, together with places that I do know and love.

The envelopes themselves carry the dust and the dirt, the human touch along the way, the endless thread of connection, ultimately encompassing the whole planet.

- Kim Lieberman 2023

33. If you have one coin with two sides

This was Lieberman’s first work made on real postage stamp paper, with official philatelic perforations, acquired through the Philatelic Services in Pretoria. This work, and Moving Halo, also a printed work done at the time, lead to the blank stamp paper.

Blank Stamp Paper

Having completed the printed works she had planned with the industrial machine-oriented Philatelic Services paper acquired from Pretoria, Lieberman still had a pile of official postage stamp paper left over. Looking around the factory she asked them to perforate it blank – with no image. An unusual request which they allowed. And from this perforated stamp paper came decades worth of work.

34. Whale | World

Drawings in Post was a series of works in which an image was placed on a map. Where a town or city intersected with any outline of the image, an envelope was posted to that location. The envelopes for this work were bought from a large international postage stamp expo at Gallagher Estate. It was The Year of the Ocean and thus the whale envelopes, stamps and postage stamps shown here.

Many of the envelopes were ‘returned to sender’ from these locations and in multiple languages. As this work was made when the local postal system was still enormously active, about 85% of the posted envelopes were returned to Lieberman.

35. Posting Boetti | Afghanistan

The Italian artist Alighiero Boetti died in 1994. As he had spent many important years of his life in Afghanistan, he had wanted his ashes scattered at the Band-e Amir Lake. But because it was too dangerous to go to Afghanistan, this request could not be done. When Lieberman read this in the Tate Gallery’s catalogue on Boetti she decided to make this work – the perfect language was post. As the lake was close to his heart, an extra envelope was added. Subsequently Lieberman told his wife Caterina Rganelli Boetti about the work, and she agreed that it made sense to use Mail Art as the medium.

36. Blood Relatives

In 1999 Lieberman was in New York on the Ampersand Fellowship. She had taken a number of sheets of the blank postage stamp paper to work on. A button had fallen off her leather jacket and after visiting the Marion Goodman Gallery she spotted a haberdashery downstairs – Greenberg and Hammer. She went in, bought some Gutterman silk thread, and went back to the apartment to sew the button back on.

She put the thread down on a sheet of stamp paper that was lying on the table and had the idea to sew the silk thread into the paper sheets. This became the next body of work that Lieberman worked on for many years. Here is an example that shows what that first work Blood Relatives (1999) looked like. This work used only blank stamps and thread and got through the postal system from New York to Johannesburg.

37. Pushing the Envelope

This was the first postal work Lieberman made. She posted one envelope to every place she had ever slept a night. In the early phase of the work she exhibited the first 17 returned envelopes on HitchHiker (1997) a pre-Biennale exhibition curated by Clive Kellner.

In 1997 she exhibited this pile of returned envelopes at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet in Cape Town. Wallpapering the walls and ceiling of the entire gallery with copies of the original envelopes.

38. Home

This object was Lieberman’s research map. This map was used to plan the how the returned envelopes would be hung.