Senior Thesis

The letters that have been lost or changed in translation have become the focus of my project. I have tatted the letters that have changed in my Swedish family names when they immigrated to the United States. These letters have become more delicate because they were so easily lost in this new place. They are now faded memories of a time and place no one in my living family truly knows. The tatted letterforms evoke the multiple levels of the journey and the change. There is the larger surface of the letterforms and the journey my family has been through, the change in location. Then there is a more interpersonal level of identity being changed to be accepted in a new society. This is emphasized in the more intimate details of the tatted letters. There are changes in names, languages and overall lifestyles to assimilate to a new way of life, changes to the surface and changes within. Who you are must now involve the changes you made, who your family is or was back home means less now that you have left that place. Who you are and what you did means something else in this new world. The threads connecting and overlapping, creating tiny details that are essential to the of a making the larger piece. The knots, slipknots, are pushed and pulled along a guiding thread to create forms. People following other family members to a distant place, like my family did. Often male family members moving first to establish some sort of ground for the rest of the family to later stand on. Rings made by looping a single thread over itself, pulled tight, drawing the knots close to form a circle.