dark water lavender


My great-grandfather served in the Navy during the Second World War. He sent letters home to his daughter, and for a long time, they were kept in a box at her house. They were hard to decipher because so much of what he’d written was censored. I remember trying to read the blacked-out lines—which I’m sure was impossible to do. I always put the letters away thinking I’d come back to them later when I had more time, but the box went missing. 

My grandmother was able to accept this disappearance with a shrug, reminding me that for her, those letters represented a period of fear and uncertainty. For the rest of us, it was devastating to have lost them. But all we ever had of his words were fragments to piece together. All we ever have of the past is fragmented. Memory flickers and fades. The stories we hand down are always changing. Dark Water Lavender pieces some of these fragments together to tell the story of a father and daughter, how their lives were shaped by one another, and by the time they spent separated by forces far outside of their control.

40 pages
handmade
soft cover, staple bound
awagami bamboo paper
15 tipped-in luster prints

Limited Copies available here
Dark Water Lavender is a part of Memory Vistas, a collaboration with writer Leah Worthy. For more information, please click here