Jar of Hearts
a participatory installation designed to unite families at multicultural weddings
Taking form as a bespoke cabinet whose shelves are adorned with curious objects inside glass containers, Jar of Hearts invites relatives at multicultural weddings to preserve and share traditions from their respective lineages. Decorated with personalised labels and notes from each family member at this hybrid Sri Lankan and Bosnian Jewish wedding, the jars and their symbolic content sit side by side, bringing to life how multicultural wedding ceremonies can weave together multiple, often contradictory, sets of traditions.
For fear of their culture getting lost and replaced, relatives from both sides of a multicultural wedding often feel divided and even competitive. Jar of Hearts uses jars as tangible symbols to preserve and honour the traditions of both cultures, while also serving as peace offerings and conversation starters between the two sets of relatives.
comunnity-building workshop
co-design: visual identity
It was important for Jar of Heart’s visual language to represent the wedding’s unification of two disparate cultural groups. This is why I hosted a workshop, inviting relatives of both the bride and groom to co-design the project’s typeface together.
First, each relative explored their own cultural symbols by creating ‘identity’ stamps. Then, they experimented with pattern-making by combining their stamp patterns with others’. Using these patterns, each relative designed 3 letters of the alphabet.
Finally, I formalized the typeface using hand-embroidery - a symbolic weaving together of both families and cultures.
