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The Mysterious Letter

Heather Carter-Simmons - Vertical Gallery

October

"I began with thoughts on communication; the difference between what is written or said and the subsequent interpretations of a text, a story, a conversation. The piece evolved through the choice of materials. I took the pages of a Nancy Drew novel, The Mysterious Letter, and folded them into origami boxes, laquered with four to twenty coats of nail polish. The choice of a box was a way to make each page of text its own unit within the structure of the story from which it had been taken, as language is a series of components: individual letters, words, sentences, paragraphs etc. I selected the Nancy Drew novel as the text, because it seemed appropriate, being both a mystery, and a book standard for an age of girls between childhood and adolescence. I liked the relationship between the ambiguous nature of the age of the reader and the simplistic, defined role model of Nancy Drew. I saw the character of Nancy Drew as a desired model of adulthood - a mystery pursued and solved with logic. A neat ending. I sought to make this "order" more ambiguous by obscuring the text with layers of polish and folding. I consider the process of the laquering to be related to identity - a process of adding layers, of making oneself a presentable, desirable object. The colour choice was made to emphasize the confectionary, fetishistic nature of the boxes. The combination of colour and texture creating a desirable object, almost edible - definitely an oral relation, an association to the mouth, to voice, bringing the train of thought back to communication."