THE SNAIL BLOG: KEEPING IN TOUCH | ELLEN CROCKET TO BONNIE HULL
The Snail Blog: Keeping in Touch | Ellen Crocket to Bonnie Hull
August 1-31, 2025 | Focus Gallery
Reception: Friday August 1, from 5:30-7:30 pm
Welcome & Artist Introductions at 6:00 pm
The Snail Blog, “a story of friendship and 5,000 postcards”, shares the correspondence of Ellen Crocket, who moved to from Salem to Vermont decades ago, to Salem artist Bonnie Hull. As Erika Bolstad describes in her recent article in the Summer 2025 Willamette magazine:
“In 2009, Hull began blogging about her daily life as an artist in Salem and her travels with Roger [the beloved late Willamette University Art History professor]. At the time, Crocket had limited access to high-speed internet at the cabin in rural Vermont where she lived with Larry, a retired pastor she met at singing camp. Her analog response to Hull was “the Snail Blog,” handwritten dispatches on those old postcards. Her notes depicted a very different life from that in Salem, a small-town New England life marked by church potlucks and choir practice.
Crocket pledged to send 100 cards from her stash: “Lucky you. I’m actually going to do this: send you every one of the stockpiled postcards left over from all those road trips. . . . Bon, gird your loins for the Snail Blog”
After 100 days the initial stack of postcards was gone, but Crocket continued on with the daily ritual to her friend in Oregon. Over the next 16 years, hundreds of daily postcards became thousands, passing the 5,000 mark earlier this year. Bonnie Hull keeps the postcards in shoeboxes arranged by date, and this will be the first time a selection of this unique daily correspondence will be shared publicly.
Similar to the note on tomorrow’s postcard, there is a delightful mystery about the content and arrangement of this coming exhibition. Simply put, “Greetings from the Bush Barn Art Center – Wish You Were Here!”
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