The letterbox Marys. Just the title of Mikala Dwyer’s installation makes me chuckle. Marian devotion, roadside shrines and the postal service collide in this marvellous image. It is worthy of the British television comedy series Father Ted. The plot line might be that a parishioner gives the parochial household a statue of the Virgin and as the house is already chock-full of Marys they decide she has to go somewhere outside yet highly visible. Closer to home, a letterbox Mary could be the kind of practical accommodation to religious feeling one might find in rural or outback Australia, sort of ‘statuary with a purpose’. I can well imagine a Marian devotee deciding no better saint should oversee and safeguard the dwindling supply of delivered mail. As Marina Warner has noted in Alone of all her sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), the meagre references to Mary in the Bible have in no way limited the many and varied uses made of her story or, indeed, her body.1