Until death do us part

For my Honors Studio class, I spent two months developing an idea and final project about my grandparents and their love story. My thesis, titled “Until death do us part,” focuses on comprehension and communication, specifically through my grandparents wedding plans.

I somewhat recently inherited a large box of letters that my grandparents wrote back and forth to each other when my Grandpa was overseas in the Korean War and living across the United States. The letters contained many stories, and in particular, their plans and ideas for their wedding. A section of my grandmother’s responses were not in the box or letters, so unfortunately I was only able to read about the wedding plans from my Grandpa’s perspective.

This installation contains handwritten, translated letters from my Grandpa, and my own, typed imaginary responses from my Grandma. I chose to encode the letters in a military code not just because my grandpa was in the military at the time, but also because it adds a sense of privacy to their wedding plans. These letters contain private conversations and details of my grandparents lives, and I felt that the best way to conceal their thoughts and words was through code. If you stood in front of this instillation long enough, you would be able to understand fragments of the story, but the code and cut up sections of the letters is supposed to force the viewer to ultimately fail at comprehending everything.

The art of writing and mailing letters is basically dead and ways of communication have completely changed since my grandparents got married in 1954. I think that there is something really special about writing to a loved one and waiting in anticipation for their response. With modern technology, we no longer communicate in the same way that my grandparents once did. This coded instillation is preserving my grandparents’ wedding story as well as the ancient art of handwriting and mailing a letter.