Annie Vought transforms old fashion letters into innovative pieces of art. In a world full of immediate communication, Annie’s art illustrates the beauty and the richness of expression in the classic handwritten letter. She describes her artistic inspiration below.
Email, text messages, instant messaging and Twitter are all examples of fun and immediate means of “written” communication. Through the computer I am in touch with people I may never have seen before and I can respond in real time to a loved one. But with the ubiquity of this access and convenience, we are losing the tangible handwritten letter. Handwritten records are fragments of individual histories. In the penmanship, word choice, and spelling, the author is often revealed in spite of him/herself. A
letter is physical confirmation of who wewere at the moment it was written, or all we have left of a person or a time.
I have a huge collection of mail, my own letters that I have kept throughout my life, as well as those of unknown others. I have hundreds of postcards collectedfrom garage sales, flea markets andeBay. There are postcards to a girl who is dying in a hospital and loves horses, letters from a salesman writing home to his family as he drives around the country selling seeds. I have a packet of over twenty love letters from a soldier named Bernard to his “darling wife” during World War II, and a stack of letters to “Mom and Dad Holt” sent from Sergeant Bill in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Reading over all of these letters, including the ones written to me, is haunting. It is
like reviewing the leftovers of people, including myself. They remind me of who I am and who my family is. When Bernard longs for his wife using racial slurs and Sergeant Bill is complaining about the weather in Saigon, I am reminded that personal histories are also American history. Collectively, the letters remind me of mistakes and longing and love and humanness. To me the letters are both positive and negative memorials.
I have been working with cut paper over the past four years. During the last three of those years my focus has been on written correspondence. In my work I recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and dissecting the intricate negative spaces with a knife. The handwriting and
the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it very strong, despite its apparent fragility. The sculptural quality of the letter allows the viewer to examine the care it took to render each piece in relationship to what is actually being said. The cutting is a way of focusing on the text and structure of the letter—an elaborate investigation into the strange properties of writing. The writer’s penmanship and word choice lead to a contemplation of the beauty of language and the limits of the paper. With these pieces, my intent is to investigate the ghosts that we leave behind and to pay homage to those that haunt us.
Annie Vought currently is living in Oakland California with her husband and a big dog. To check out more of her work go to annievought.com.