When we first received the project, I didn’t know what kind of concept I would want to do on and just thought that I should experiment with different kinds of materials and explore on what I can do with the materials. Most of the materials are pretty basic, like sponges, leaves, bubble wraps, plastic bowls, cotton buds etc basically the things you can mostly find at home.
This was a pretty challenging project but yet after weeks of exploration and brain-storming for different ideas, seeing the end product gave me a great sense of achievement and I really enjoyed the process.
Initially when I was coming out with concepts, I thought about two main concepts. The first one is emotions that we have every day, weekly, monthly and yearly. This first main idea consists of four groups of emotions, but I felt that they might be a little overlapping as what we feel on a daily basis can also be felt in the whole month itself which doesn’t sound very convincing at all.
So, the second concept is what I eventually chose: Emotions that can be expressed VS Emotions that can be felt but can’t be expressed. I came out with this idea as I remember seeing “unusual” words on social medias that describes a particular feeling that one feels but yet there isn’t an exact emotion that could express it. Thus, I thought I would go into this direction and research more on these words.
These are words I picked out that seem relevant to emotions taken from my visual journal:
As you can see from all these meanings to the description of emotions that can’t be expressed, all of them actually have more than one kind of main emotion that can be felt. Therefore, they are mixed emotions that one cannot really express.
Thus I decided to work on it and thought that since they are mixed emotions, all of them should look very complicated and there should be a mixtures of materials used when creating the strip of each different feeling. However, there was a contemplation about it as it may all look too confusing to decipher that particular emotion that I am trying to show.
I had to figure out which kind of emotions could fit together to depict the mixed emotion on the strip.
Some of the materials used while exploring
My finger prints are also a form of “material” used as well.
Outcome of the materials used with different techniques! I tried many different textures to mix and match and try to see which one is the most suited for a particular emotion that can’t be explained.
Therefore i feel that my work in progress is mainly from experimenting different textures myself and coming into a conclusion if the strip actually shows what the emotion it was trying to portray. My next post will be about the strips i have chosen and the explanation of why i chose that strip 🙂