Dear Darling: A Mail Art Project

Dear Darling is a collaborative mail art project that provides joy, levity, and tenderness through an exchange of letters and artwork. After a year of exchanging letters, the project will culminate in an anthology documenting all visual work produced and a pop-up exhibition in a community space. The project builds on my previous body of work around my alter ego/fairy godmother/personal demon, Batshit. Through Batshit and the world in which Batshit lives, I explore sensuality, sexuality, nostalgia, and the absurd. Batshit also works as an advice columnist which I currently run online via email and social media. Dear Darling is a step out of the digital and into the tangible tenderness of letterwriting.

Artist bio

Annika Earley (she/they) makes intimate works on paper about her alter-ego/fairy godmother/personal demon named Batshit. Her work considers the demands and joys of motherhood, sensuality and sexuality, gender, and pre-teen nostalgia. She often uses German fairy and folk tales and Spice Girls lyrics as reference points in her work.

Earley holds an MFA from Maine College of Art and an M.Phil from College of the Atlantic. She has been a resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, Monson Arts in Monson, Pace House Residency in Stonington, and the Walkaway House in North Adams, Massachusetts. She has been supported by the St. Botolph Foundation in Boston, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Albert K, Murray Fund, and SPACE Gallery’s American Rescue Plan Grant. Earley’s work is in the collections of the University of Southern Maine and the College of the Atlantic and has been most recently exhibited at Field Projects in New York City and Moss Galleries in Falmouth. She currently lives in Belfast, Maine.

Social media
Annika Earley | Instagram

Cover image: Annika Earley, Internal Family Systems, 2024, gouache on paper, 22" x 30"