The Love Lettering Project is a community arts project that brings love letters to strangers, and what’s more awesome than receiving an anonymous love letter? I have been writing love poems, turning them into one-of-a-kind paper and thread collages, slipping them into vintage air mail envelopes marked ‘love’ and leaving them for strangers to find each year for the past seven.

The objective of The Love Lettering Project is to transform strangers’ relationship to public spaces, through anonymous love letters to those very spaces. It offers an unexpected chance to stop and see places familiar or strange without any pressure to respond.

After my biggest summer of love lettering yet in 2011, I began developing The Love Lettering Project as a community-generated project through the Toronto Public Library system during Culture Days and at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Family Learning Centre. It was wonderful to see what people from all ages and different corners of the city love about Toronto – ravines, the CN Tower, the cherry trees in High Park and so on.

The first two 2012 events will take place on May 27 and July 29 as part of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, where I will engage people in creating their own love letters by inviting them to reflect on what they love about Toronto and write them love letters. I (along with a group of volunteers) will photograph and document these community art pieces and words and post them on a love lettering website. Participants will then take their airmail-enveloped love letters out to the very places they love to leave for others to discover.

The second phase of this 2012 project (slated for Culture Days) will be a cartographic installation where a group of visual artists will create and interpret different neighbourhoods of Toronto, incorporating the love letters the public has written.