Communication & Barriers To Communication

Untold war stories, secret information, suppressed feelings and fears,
the subtle limits to all communication that military training demands of young soldiers,
the heritage of silence that damages the emotional life of veterans and their families.

Dream Plane: War Stories will be about communication and barriers to communication. This project will try to reveal the facts of the air-war missions during World War II as visualized through the personal experiences of the artist. Untold war stories, secret information, and suppressed feelings and fears come to the surface and are reflected visually through memorabilia and images that could have been experienced by many American families who shared their lives with veterans from this era. 

At a higher level of recognition, the artist will also explore the subtle limits to all communication that military training demands of young soldiers, and the heritage of silence that damages the emotional life of veterans and their families. In this sense, it is an important women’s issue concerning family and trauma and the experience of violence.

As an artist, I make photographs and room-size installations. My Dream Plane: War Stories research, exhibition and publication project will include both, as well as text materials.

​This project is drawn from my family’s experiences, records, memorabilia, and memories of World War II, which are a microcosm for our country’s experiences, records, memorabilia, and memories at home and in service of that long and costly war. 

In my parents’ generation all the young men in my family were soldiers. During World War II my father piloted a C-47 troop carrier in the Normandy Invasion and made two trips from England. His brother was a radio operator on a small island in the Pacific. My mother’s two brothers were also at Normandy in different capacities, and the two families (who were neighbors in rural central Pennsylvania throughout their lives) waited for sons and brothers and husbands to send infrequent letters and finally, after years away, to come home safely.

My father, like many WWII veterans, did not share his experience as a soldier. It was not until the 20th century was coming to a close and my brother and I found memorabilia in our family home in Lewisburg, PA, that we began to discover the relevant facts of his past. It gave us a picture of how our father and uncles came to maturity far from home and how their perspectives on the world were formed within conflict. We understand so much more about them and their parents and wives and fiancés and the huge gulf of communication that they all experienced during that war. Gaps remain and these are part of the loss that compounds over time and affects so many more individuals than those who experienced the original conflict. Now, sharing this visual representation of memories and experiences, may help the viewer not only connect to a specific time and place, but also to reach an understanding of the subtle lasting damage that any experience of war inflicts on the us all.