Dear Mother, Letters to My First Home
Mariam Elasser
This thesis is an attempt to understand how prompts and spaces for safe, open and unimpeded exploration of a daughter’s own experience, through, for example, letter-writing and other forms of narrative therapy, can help heal, strengthen, or repair a daughter’s sense of self-identity and negative self-identification with an “other”–whether it be the mother or other deep, personal and identity-forming relationships. As a designer and a daughter, my relationship with my mother has impacted nearly every aspect of my growth as a person and has in many ways negatively mediated my experience of the world. While larger systemic change is necessary to break the cycles of generational trauma passed on through matrilineal bonds as well as facilitate more productive and unimpeded experiences of female identity formation, this thesis explores how design and narrative centering might help us take first steps towards larger generational change and affect the existence and lived experiences of future daughters on individual, cultural, and environmental scales.
Dear Mother Poster in Subway
Posters were put up around NYC prompting daughters to share their stories. Each poster lead to an anonymous Google form that asked two questions: when were you born, and if you could go back in time to the day you were born and tell your mother anything, what would you say?
Dear Mother Poster in Street
Over the course of the year I received over 78 submissions from daughters of all walks of life. Every morning I would wake up to a notification of a new letter and the first thing I would do is read it. Some made me laugh, many made me cry, but all filled me with a sense of deep gratitude, that these daughters had shared with me something so intimate, so important.
Dear Mother Poster in Street
These submissions, these letters, are what I began using in my explorations which are varied in their approach and did not always lead to immediate success but which all, in turn, guided me towards the medium that I felt did this work justice.
Embroidery Hoop of a Letter Submitted to the Form
Embroidery Hoop of a Letter Submitted to the Form
Embroidery Hoop of a letter submitted to the form
The Dear Mother Living Archive
This website serves as a living archive of all the letters I received over the course of this past year. On this website, you can scroll through and read each letter as well as see them organized by decade and language. The website continues to be updated in real time and will remain open indefinitely. Link: dearmother.cargo.site
Cyanotype in Embroidery Hoop
The face of a woman from the painting The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Bryullov (1833).
Cyanotype in Embroidery Hoop
A scene from the film Ladybird (dir. Greta Gerwig) of mother and daughter sleeping side by side.