There Was Once a Traveller… by multidisciplinary artist Yoma Emore unfolds as an intricate cartography of memory, migration, and correspondence, where the materiality of textile becomes a repository of lived experience and historical residue. Anchored in letters exchanged between her mother and international pen pals during the 1970s and 1980s, this body of work transforms epistolary communication into tactile landscapes—maps of intimacy, longing, and the enduring traces we leave behind.
Through a process of hand-stitched embroidery, screen-printing, and layered textile compositions, the series enacts a speculative archaeology of epistolary exchange – inscribing the affective and bureaucratic traces of yearning, diasporic movement, and deferred connection. This body of work foregrounds the epistolary as a mode of historical transmission, positioning the act of letter-writing as both an intimate ritual and an archival mechanism for mapping transnational kinships.
At the heart of There Was Once a Traveler… is a story that speaks to the power of chance, connection, and the way letters collapse time and distance. Among the many correspondences Emore uncovered in her mother’s archive was one with a German pen pal, Josef. In a serendipitous twist of fate, a two-year-old letter Josef wrote to Emore’s mother would travel with her to France, where she would fortuitously meet her pen pal. The surreal encounter, years in the making, marked the beginning of their real-life friendship. It is precisely these moments – where time folds, where letters carry destinies, where absence transforms into presence – that Emore captures.
Conceptually structured as an unfolding journey, There Was Once a Traveler… comprises interrelated chapters—The Traveler’s Map, My Dear Oleghenju, Josef’s Dreams, Tsemogha’s Tales, The Adventures of Liz Chowdhury, 8130 Rothenfeld, and The Post Box Chronicles - each operating as a topography of memory, a site where letters, stamps, travel documents, and postal inscriptions are reconfigured through the slow labor of textile-making. In these works, the stitched line functions as both a formal and conceptual articulation of movement and entanglement, tracing the transits of individuals whose exchanges transcend the geographic and temporal constraints imposed by state infrastructures. Maps emerge as visual and conceptual leitmotifs - textiles that mimic cartographic aesthetics, where the personal is rendered as a psychogeographic terrain, an interior atlas of imagined and real landscapes.
Textiles, in this series, function not simply as material, but as mnemonic surfaces, palimpsests of labour, inscription, and affective resonance. The postal aesthetics of the work – its chromatic lexicon of reds, blues, and archival browns – signal both the bureaucratic rigidity of state
