LONDON: A FOND REMEMBRANCE OF MARK PAWSON, AN ARTIST WITH A MISCHIEVOUS — AND DEEPLY HUMANISTIC

LONDON: A FOND REMEMBRANCE OF MARK PAWSON, AN ARTIST WITH A MISCHIEVOUS — AND DEEPLY HUMANISTIC — VISION

FROM MAIL ART TO THE RECYCLING AND REUSE OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING, THE RECENTLY DECEASED ARTIST SOUGHT TO CREATE BOUNTIES FROM THE MOST HUMBLE MATERIALS

Published on April 1, 2025

Editor’s note: A sad fact of life is that death waits for — and spares — no one. Even the worst scoundrel’s act, along with all the antics of every prince and potentate — eventually, they’ll all be silenced by the dropping of a final curtain.

Within communities of artists, to lose a comrade in creative adventure — and mischief — can be very painful for everyone who knew and was inspired by the deceased. When such fellow travelers in those places where the imagination erupts with notable energy in the so-called real world leave the scene — for good — without having earned what their friends and associates feel was the attention and appreciation they might have deserved — well, that’s a fate that can hurt the departed’s admirers, too.

The British artist Mark Pawson (1964-2025) Mark at his stall at the Independent Publishers Fair in London. Undated photo by Natalie Kay-Thatcher

With such thoughts in mind, the painter, sculptor, and mixed-media artist Cathy Ward, brutjournal’s London-based artist-correspondent, sent us the following remembrance of Mark Pawson, a dear friend and colleague of many artists in the British capital. Cathy knew him well and savored his sense of humor and his provocative ideas.

From London, Cathy Ward reports:

Mark Pawson (1964-2025) was involved in and created a multitude of artistic projects and events. Among them: recycling, printing, mail art, self-publishing, the making of all sorts of stickers and badges, organizing and hosting “free-stuff” parties, encouraging the reuse and sharing of goods and materials, and art-making using Xerox machines. He was an expert in “noggins” (see photo, below) and was interested in patterns, detritus, and Kinder eggs, those egg-shaped chocolates containing small plastic toys (“Kinder Surprises”).

Mark’s recent, untimely death sent a groan of disbelief through his London-based community of artist friends and, even farther afield, throughout his worldwide network of mail art contacts and collaborators.

Above: Graphic-design creations by Mark Pawson. On the left, his custom-made badges and, on the right, a plastic sign featuring one of his slogans. Photo, left, by Mark Pawson; photo, right, by Tatty Divine.

Mark Pawson with some of his “noggins” at his stand at the Table Top Museum at the Art Makers’ Guild, London, in an undated photo by Hazel Jones. Over the years, Pawson amassed a collection of wooden, knickknack noggins of all shapes and sizes. He was his own, self-appointed “Chief Noggin.” His fondness for these objects reflected a side of the artist his friends found funny, endearing, and somewhat perplexing.

At university, Mark studied sociology, which, to those who knew him, made perfect sense. Creating and exchanging mail art — artist-produced cards, letters, collages, printed matter, and more, that is sent through the postal mail — became his sole, practical art education. In 1980s, in London, for many artists, how to go about exhibiting their art was an incomprehensible mystery. How could one ever enter the ridiculously rarefied space of The Gallery? Art dealers were gatekeepers. Many artists struggled to show their work, for there simply weren’t many or any opportunities to do so.

Mark sidestepped those obstacles by developing his own diverse, network of like-minded creators from all walks of life and of all ages and backgrounds, from many countries around the world. Instead of merely being on the receiving end of a constant stream of rejections dispatched by the powers that be, as a maker of mail art, he tapped into a rich vein of like-minded, liberated creative types and found a broad, appreciative audience, all from his work bench at home and simply by using the postal system as a mode for both presenting and distributing his art.

Mark Pawson, in a photo he shot himself, holding up a piece of mail art he had received from the older, Japanese artist Shōzō Shimamoto (1928-2013). A member of the influential, post-World War II, avant-garde Gutai artists’ group, for many years toward the end of his life, Shimamoto was very actively involved in the international mail art network.

Mark’s knowledge was encyclopedic. Like a connoisseur, he knew about printing methods, DIY publishing, Japanese Print Gocco machines, and the uses and characteristics of all sorts of papers, plus he came to know a wide world of underground, graphic-art-oriented mail artists.

Mark was deeply immersed in the international mail art scene; he put so much care into the crafting of the intimate-feeling artworks that he shared with his correspondents, who were allowed and encouraged to add to his creations as they sent them around the world among each other.

Mark’s activity in the international mail art network spanned several decades. Through it, he established creative relationships with contacts in Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. For Mark, his awareness of the political situation in each of his correspondents’ countries, along with his appreciation of the methods for making mail art that were available to them, made his receiving of their mail art items something joyful and full of respect for his fellow mail artists’ creativity.

Mark Pawson’s self-produced booklet, Die-Cut Plug Wiring Diagrams (1992), whose binding he sewed by hand with thread. Such tiny, handmade books are objects of fascination and beauty. Undated photos; photographer’s name unknown

Mark did everything meticulously. His admiration of so-called low culture and the overlooked fueled his amassing of a vast archive of objects that he found, kept, and appreciated — and then transformed into something else.

In some ways, Mark reminded me of the Scottish-born artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005). One time, I gave Mark a plaster-cast figurine made by Paolozzi, which Eduardo had given to me, so that it could join Mark’s large family of knickknacks and unusual objects.

I often wondered how Mark and Eduardo might have gotten along, had they ever met, and what kind of art might have sprung from such a friendship. On the one hand there was Eduardo, who was known for cutting up and reusing all sorts of ephemera in his collage-based works; he also loved toys and multiples. Eduardo and Mark — each one of them, n his own right, was a creative giant. One of them, Eduardo, had helped invent Pop Art, while the other, Mark, became an avid demolisher of what he called “serious culture.”

Detail from a sheet of printed “DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE” stickers designed and produced by Mark Pawson. Photo by the artist, from his archive

For Mark, everything in his world had a value and merited a place in which to be preserved, appreciated, and archived. The discards he found and brought home all became parts of his grand collection of unwanted specimens of unpopular culture, which, through his imagination, he transformed into deeply meaningful treasures.

Mark documented some of his collections in the form of little publications he produced himself. Among others, they included one focusing on his collection of small, plastic baby dolls, another dedicated to his holdings of more than 7500 Kinder eggs, and another documenting his cache of some 700 clip-on plastic mustaches.

Mark Pawson’s subversive sense of humor was evident in his “supermarket SABOTAGE” stickers, with their wildly manipulated, made-to-malfunction bar codes. Photo by the artist, from his archive

Some of the multiples Mark produced included his “Bicycle Wheel Theft Commemorative Enamel Plaque” (1995). At one point, he served as the London coordinator of the Decentralized Worldwide Postal Art Congress, and then there was the time he took in something called “The Festival of Plagiarism” in Glasgow.

In London, Mark’s work was collected by Tate Modern. Let’s hope that his huge archive collection of mail art will be kept and preserved, so that future artists and researchers may have access to it and, among its vast holdings, find inspiration to go out and do it themselves.