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. Once I’d finished penning something I have always been pained by the paranoia of my words being found. 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.