Letters From The Road

Letters From the Road

Artist: Charles Haynes

Date: January 5 to 21, 1984

The work in this exhibition was selected from fifteen years of postal artwork sent from around the world by Charles Haynes to his close friends Bruce and Liz Bennett. While the work was from the Bennetts' collection, a number of other people received similar bodies of work during this period.

The work was not intended for exhibition, but in the best traditions of serious artmaking was intended simply to be itself. It was made for the joy of making, and for the delight of receipt. It followed the tradition of collage assemblage established by dadaists such as Citroen and Schwitters. It was primarily literary in nature, frequently philological in substance and often philosophical in attitude. Haynes obsessed with the etymologies of words in a variety of languages, and also with maps as a summation of certain kinds of human knowledge and attitude. In many of his pieces these interests were combined.

Haynes method of work asserted that the creative process could be one of discovery and selection as much as invention. 

(Box 9, File 1984: S1) Contains an informal interview with Haynes by Bruce. Bennett