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Portal Postcard Project Interview with Harriet Gaffney - Surf Coast Shire Arts Officer What was the inspiration behind launching the Portal Postcard Project in the Surf Coast? When it became evident that Victoria would be in Lockdown for some time Surf Coast Shire Council knew that the Arts would be vital in helping to ensure well-being. As Arts Officer, I saw that we needed to support not only individual practitioners whose incomes would be severely impacted, but also the well-being of the wider community. Whilst there were a plethora of fabulous offerings online from arts practitioners and organisations across the world, our own artists were about to lose the most significant arts event run by the Shire – The Surf Coast Arts Trail, and few of them had the skills to pivot their own work online without support. That’s how #Portal was born. #Portal Postcards grew out of early recognition that our community needed to be able to do more for their wellbeing than screen-related activities during lockdown. We wanted to create a COVID-responsive arts program that would support individual artists and the community connect.
We soon discovered that one of our Arts Trail artists, Deirdre Boeyen-Carmichael, was painting these spectacular postcard-size paintings and gifting them to isolated members of the community and we loved the idea. A few mornings each week activist and artist Deirdre would paint the sunrise from the same location and record information on the back including time, wind direction and tide. Each postcard was a time capsule, created during a time that was new and uncertain, and for some people very lonely. Deirdre wanted to give people hope and joy and connect them to the glorious natural world we are so lucky to call home, and we loved this. With her permission we decided to take the project Shire-wide.
How did you engage the postcard artists? We contacted our registered artists directly and shared the story of Deirdre’s individual postcard project. Artists were given five blank postcards with the knowledge that three of their works would go to vulnerable/isolated members of the community and two would return to them from other participating artists. Through social and print media and the PORTAL website the general public were also encouraged to get involved. On December 16th 2020, PORTAL will launch an online exhibition of selected works on the website www. surfcoastartstrail.com.au
How did you link up with the recipients? The Surf Coast Shire distributed the postcards to artists and used their Positive Ageing Client mailing list to send out approximately 150 postcards.
