Love Letters…

2023 - 2024

A collection of handwritten letters addressed to those from past, present and future, combining mark making and asemic writing.

I’ve always been a writer. Way before I discovered photography at age 12, words were my creative love. Scribbling into notebooks and diaries or writing letters to my mother because I couldn’t say how I felt. Later, there’s memories of etching pain on to pages in psych hospitals. I have hardly anything from my childhood, but there’s boxes of notebooks somewhere in the loft I share with my husband.

Writing has always been a fraught activity for me though. Once I’d finished penning something I have always been pained by the paranoia of my words being found, thanks to my father reading some personal letters as a young person. It has stayed with me, the desire to hide or destroy my words.

Writing these letters has been so freeing: to write with words that are hidden, obscured, creating a language that has no shared meaning. There is such a safety in asemic writing that allows you to reveal everything and it mean nothing to anyone, except yourself.

The love letters are addressed to:

… those I no longer love.
… those that I never loved.
… those that I still love.
… those that I’ve longed to love.
… those I’m letting go.