Auckland Museum - Love and Loss

Auckland War Memorial Museum

Project Brief

From letters and diaries to emails and direct messages, the exhibition explores the ways we communicate feelings of love and how that has changed and stayed the same over time. Bringing together items from the Auckland Museum collection with loans and donations from the public, Love & Loss is about the emotional power of the written word and the sacred place letters, messages, texts hold in all our lives.

Roles

  • Creature Post designed and created an emotive animated projection mapped interactive love story “Dear, dear girl” between Richard Turakina Grace, and his sweetheart Alice. The animation is made from excerpts of his letters and drawings to her, the main focus during his service away from New Zealand in the first world war. Life moves on and the pair are never married but remain life long family friends. His last letter to her in 1963, reflects on how important both his feelings for her, and the importance of the correspondence at that time, was to him. He would die the following year.
  • Credits

    Kavi Chetty - Interpretive Planner
    Nina Finigan - Curator Manuscripts
    Esther Tobin - Manager Interpretive Planning and Development
    Louise Langdon - Digital Project Manager
    Briar Davies - Digital Experience Producer
    Liam Brown - Audio Visual Manager
    Gilbert Zhao - Audio Visual Technician
    Dion Pieta - Tumuaki Māori & Pacific Development
    Sound and Music - Previn Naidu
    Voice talent -Richard (young) Kauri Williams
    Voice talent - Richard (old) Dion Pieta

These letters were found tucked away in a closet of Alice’s and donated to the Musuem.