I grew up with stories. Listening to family tales of past adventures over and over, they became stitched into my understanding of the world.

For the past five years, I’ve focused on conversations with my mother, a pioneer of industrial design, and later a designer/weaver. I’m now expanding the field to include letters and stories from my grandparents during their years living in Iran and the Philippines. Grandpa was hired as an engineering consultant and worked with various companies to increase their economic efficiencies. This was during the Shah’s “Westernization” project, and before the revolution. He wrote a series of very detailed letters home to family and friends, and they were, thankfully, saved. His perspective is different from what I hear in the news, and also quite contrasting to reports from the Iranian diaspora literature. It is a tangled complicated history.

As in any new project, it begins with research, and that falls into two categories. First is lots of reading on historical and cultural context. Understanding where these personal letters of fit into the larger web of events is necessary to inform the work and connect it to current challenges in cultural suppression, colonization, and social hierarchy.

The other, more fun, research that balances all the bookish-ness, is creative play: exploring a myriad of ways to express words, letters, texts, and ideas. I’ve taken an online course called “Inspired by Lives and Letters” and really enjoyed the experience of learning online, at my own pace. This directed experimentation is a creative work-out leading to materials and methods that express these texts as visual translations.