She's Got Mail

She's Got Mail

Elle Magazine, 2001. Corinne Lamoral

In this age of high-tech communication Kim Lieberman has made an art out of the interconnectedness of messages given and received through the mail, creating a new art medium she calls "post art".

This Witwatersrand Technicon graduate first began her fascination with postal art in 1996 when she created art out of hundreds of letters returned poste restante addresses around the world. After several successful exhibitions both locally and internationally, winning a few awards including an Ampersand Foundation Fellowship, she caught the Vita judges' attention with her solo exhibition Blood Relatives in December last year.

The work carries her postal are to new levels. Each piece is painstakingly hand-stitched with silk thread through the tiny perforations on lank postage stamp paper to create beautifully crafted and original works. While letter writing seems to be a dying art in the face of e-mails and SMS messaging, Kim goes much deeper with a complex web of conceptual themes.

Explaining the choice for her title Blood Relatives, Kim tells me how she discovered more and more meanings behind her work as she went along.

"It's basically about the interconnectedness through blood of family and of being Jewish and also, as women, we are the blood carriers for future generations. All the work is also about the idea of home - finding out where that is."

She also uses Gematria - a numeric system in the Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition) - and catalogues where all the different squares were stitched, attaching meaning to conversations she had while making them.

If all this seems a little too intellectual for you - don't worry. Each piece is so visually stimulating and exquisitely made, you'll want to add them to your collection. After all, home is where the art is.