Material Emoting
(ongoing)
What defines our humanity is our capacity for language – our ability to communicate story, abstraction, concept – to communicate the unreal. However, language is a point of struggle– the bedrock for miscommunication and misunderstanding. I see language itself as an abstraction – something that takes us out of the pure presence of the material world and into the world of the mind– the world of idea. While spoken word is a beautiful tool, we may often feel like we are speaking different languages and misunderstanding each other.
I’m curious about material, object, and shape as the universal human language. This project is an attempt at distilling feelings and internal experiences into objects themselves so that we may better communicate with each other, so that we may better understand each other. So that we may experience the beauty of silence and the pleasure of understanding each other simultaneously. So that we may develop deeper understanding and greater capacity for empathy.
This project addresses the fact that language shapes and defines the way we understand and relate to our own experience. We don’t always have the means to express ourselves or put words to what we are feeling. Our vocabulary isn’t as expansive as our experience, and as a result — like children who haven’t started speaking yet — our true experience remains in the unconscious.
Repressed emotions often have material consequences that can cause us to act out, or consume and discard at unprecedented rates. The internal shape and state of our world directly forms the external world:
As we toss things into the trash and disregard their landfill futures, something similar seems to be happening with our unwanted emotions. We shove them away, out of sight and out of mind, with the hope that ignoring them will help them disappear. We shove them away because we don’t fully understand how they work, what their purpose is, what to do with them, or how they decompose. In the same way our world is rupturing with trash as waste overflows and trickles into our streets, waterways, bodies— the same thing is happening to our internal world. We’re learning that linear and binary systems aren’t healthy for our internal or external environments.
This project engages with the public in order to create a new ‘language’ so that we may bring our internal experience into the light. This attempt at a universal object language is designed to help us express ourselves even when we don’t have the words to do so. These objects are here to mirror our feelings and experiences back to us, allowing us to sit in recognition of them: Finding simplicity in the complexity of our internal world
Photos from Material Emoting Workshop & Exhibition
KINGS CROSS, LONDON | December 2021
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