ABOUT

THE FILM

M.A.I.L. is a feature length documentary about a family working together to preserve their archive of Mail Art.

Long before the rise of Facebook and Twitter, artists around the world built their own social network through the postal system and called it Mail Art. Founded in the 1950’s, this DIY, proudly counter-cultural network consists of thousands of artists who have been sending art to each other from across the planet for over five decades. In an era before the internet, social and political organizing had to happen through the mail because telecoms were so expensive.

Because these friendships last for so long, these artists each have thousands of works of art stashed in their garages, basements and bedrooms. Unfortunately, because these archives don’t have monetary value, most of them end up in the trash once the artists pass away– and because the movement has been active for so long, many of the artists who relied on this network for anti-establishment connection and subverting political censorship are passing away.

With every artist who dies, their history is forgotten alongside their legacies.

We are building a platform for mail artists to tell their stories in their own words before it’s too late.

THE TEAM

We’re Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch. We’re co-directing M.A.I.L., and are co-founders of The Mudroom, a NYC-based creative studio making the invisible visible through magical realism and storytelling.

Together, we created the short documentary ‘The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms,’ which collages painting and live action film footage together to tell a story about life and love with a chronic illness. You can watch it here. In M.A.I.L., we’re experimenting with new techniques to once again make an underground experience visible.

We started production on M.A.I.L. in 2022 when we filmed the apartment of the late E.F. Higgins III and interviewed his sister Ginny as she grappled with his death and the future of his archive. Since then, we’ve traveled to eight locations across six countries including Uruguay, Czechia, Argentina and Hungary. At the time of writing, we have completed 19 interviews with mail artists, archivists, and community members with related creative practices.

We still have a long way to go. We have further trips to planned to East Asia, Africa and Latin America. Coupled with post production, our tentative release date is early 2028.

Here’s a bit more about the two of us respectively:

ELOISE SHERRID

Mail Art Alias: Einstein

Likes: Covering the entire envelope in stamps

Dislikes: The privatization of the US Postal Service

Eloise is an NYC based filmmaker and artist. A life long letter writer, she tells stories about the emotional and political dimensions of art, geography and economics. 

Her projects have shown at venues nationally and internationally, including Hot Docs International Film Festival, the Rubin Foundation, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the Venice Biennale for Architecture. Her work has been screened at education institutions such as Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Maryland, and is available for viewing on POV Shorts from PBS and The Criterion Channel. Her work has been discussed in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, STAT, Bad At Sports, and e-flux.

Eloise holds a BFA ‘16 from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently studying communications and conflict negotiation at the City University of New York. When not behind the camera, she plays table-top RPGs, hikes mountains, and sews quilts out of fabric scraps. She has had her own ever growing archive of mail art stashed under her bed since middle school. 

Her website is here.

LAURYN WELCH

Mail Art Alias: Red

Likes: Dinging the little service bell at the post office desk

Dislikes: Damaged packages that arrive in plastic body bags

Lauryn (Red) Welch is a Brooklyn based artist and a longtime resident of the New Hampshire Monadnock Region. They participated in their first collaborative mail art performance as a baby when their dad Crackerjack Kid put them in a mailbox, titled Special Delivery: Kid of Kid!

As a result of receiving this photo, Ray Johnson subsequently inducted Lauryn his New York Correspondence school as its youngest member to date. Since then, Lauryn has been both a participant and  researcher within the mail art network. They apprenticed as an assistant archivist for the Eternal Network Mail Art Archive from 2010 to 2012. They co-curated two mail art shows at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Sharon Arts Gallery. In 2020, they participated in a mail art panel at the College Art Association moderated by Lucinda Bliss. 

Lauryn received an MFA from Hunter College in 2023. As a painter and filmmaker, their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Half Gallery in New York, and Andrea Festa Fine Art in Rome, with film acquisitions by PBS and The Criterion Channel.

Check out their website here.

THE ARCHIVIST

There’s no film without Crackerjack.

Chuck Welch (Mail Art alias Crackerjack Kid) has been a mail artist for nearly 50 years. He’s Lauryn’s dad.

Fifteen years ago, Chuck began the arduous and painstaking process of recording and digitizing every piece of mail art he received into a collection he calls the Eternal Network Mail Art Archive. Since 1973, Chuck has amassed over 40,000 pieces of mail art ephemera from 2,000 artists residing in 55 countries across 6 continents. In size, the archive is about 250 boxes measuring 500 linear feet– about 1.25 football fields long. All together, it weighs one metric ton; about the weight of an old sedan.

In M.A.I.L, Chuck serves as a guide and sage of Mail Art, traveling with Eloise, Lauryn and his wife Cathy as they meet the artists in his archive - often for the very first time.

Likes: Connecting with artists all over the world through letters

Dislikes: The rising cost of postage

ACCOMPLICES

CATHRYN WELCH

Mail Art Alias: Cathyjack

Likes: Taping up a box perfectly

Dislikes: Packages left in the snow

Cathryn has been collaborating with Chuck in art and life for 52 years. She’s been crucial in the organization of Chuck’s massive archive. Cathryn is also an ophthalmologist with a passion for architecture, art and design.

On our travels, Cathy provides crucial support as administrator and logistician. Every mail artist friend of Chuck’s knows Cathy, just like they know Lauryn. Mail art is a family’s game.

Dev Hardikar

Assistant Editor

Likes: Checking the mailbox every day like it's Christmas morning

Dislikes: Getting every single previous tenants' junk mail

Dev Hardikar is an artist and videographer from Brooklyn. They've worked on dry corporate shoots, bizarre internet comedy, and semi historical regional epics.

Despite a background in radio journalism, they're begrudgingly skilled at short form video. With hundreds of thousands of eyes on their work, they try to use their powers for good rather than evil.

Dev has a talent for finding the story in a chaotic mess and pulling it to the surface.

KAITLIN GASPAR

Assistant Animator

Likes: The taste of envelope glue

Dislikes: Paper cuts on her tongue

Kaitlin Gaspar is a NYC based fabricator, set designer, and stop motion animator. Working mainly in the film industry, Kaitlin is relatively new to the world of Mail Art. Through collaborations with Alan Wagner, her prop work has graced thousands of mailboxes worldwide. KG is a hands-on, problem solving, DIY kind of artist, often using recycled materials to craft the worlds of heartfelt “indie” (read: low budget) short films, or reconfiguring landfill-bound broken tech into apparently functioning absurdist machinery for viral posters. A graduate from NYU, she has rave reviews from many teachers that “kaitlin was a pleasure to have in class.”