LIZZY MCCAUGHAN
from my house to your house
Embossed prints on paper
7 x 7 cm
2020
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"What has impacted me most about the pandemic is the isolation, every time. I just miss being around other people. It’s made me consider the nature of the ways we relate to each other, which I have simply taken for granted in the past. Communication has become a long word, stretching all the way from Zoom to the Christmas card list. Could I manage to keep making, and working, in a way that still has meaning for myself?
I’ve been limited to working at the kitchen table for weeks during the lockdowns, especially during the first one in the spring - though that has had its moments, between BBC6Music and the biscuit tin. I had been having a lot of success, in my own terms, with using my pasta making machine as a little printing press, the pasta press. Just now, the scale of the tiny embossed prints somehow seemed appropriate to the times. I thought I might stick the prints to card blanks, and post them to that Christmas card list, as a way of accepting absence and saying I'm thinking about you although I’m here and you’re there. I remembered Ray Johnson’s 1960s mail art movement in New York, sending small art works through the post thereby validating their status, which grew out of Fluxus and other radical art groups of the period. It became the New York Correspondence School (still going strong in various digital iterations). Maybe I have needed that validation myself, in isolation? So I devised my own MailArt project and it’s called from my house to your house.
I’m excited this has led to being a part of the Correspondence Collective online exhibition ‘Restriction’ at Clayhill Arts in Bridgwater, Somerset, for which artists were invited to submit work that reflected the limitations of art practice during the pandemic."
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Lizzy McCaughan
March 2021
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Instagram: @lizzymccaughan
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