Feel + Feeling

 

2020-2021

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This body of work explores the psychological effects of physical stimuli. There are many dualities in the verbiage we use to describe touch; we feel an object and we feel an emotion, we touch something physically and are touched by something psychologically. I began contemplating this concept by creating several mind maps, like the one you see here. I considered my emotional relationship to touch and tactility at the beginning of the Pandemic when, for the first time in my life, touch became a form of currency. I found myself longing for simple acts of physical interaction. I felt that this touch deprivation almost made me forget my own mortality by not being able to fully experience the tactile world. 

 

This being said, my relationship to touch has always been complex. As a child, I experienced Sensory Over Responsivity disorder, a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder manifested through overly emotional responses to certain sensory triggers. With my own experience as a reference, I further researched psychological conditions that affect responses to stimuli.

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I used the body, specifically the skin, as a visual reference because the skin is how we experience touch. Also, the body is familiar to us, however, that familiarity becomes unsettling when viewed as an object separate from ourselves.

 

Throughout the course of the 2020-21, I continued to develop this body of work that explored different materials and forms that explore the relationship between the physical and psychological.

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