“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” 

Jung: Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype

 

In the work titled “Emotions” the artist continues her exploration into the nature of human perception. The difference between what we “feel” and what we “know”. How the visceral brain is fundamental to our relationship with the world.

 

Using words as the tool to convey the idea, text is arranged to form concentric circles that fill the page with a vast range of sensations. 

 

The elements of the composition have been trawled for, and extracted from, the Oxford English Dictionary and arranged alphabetically which emphasises the ambiguousness of human feeling. 

 

By using a conceptual structure of phonemes, which we call the “alphabet”, the work accentuates the association of emotions that our mind can construct at any one time. Sanguine, sappy, satanic – ideological, idiotic, idle, all exist alongside each other on the page, just as we can recognize these emotions working together on our psyche. Within our vision lays a snapshot of mixed senses.

 

Moving away from the individual words that form the composition, and looking at the work in its entirety, gaps start to open up.  This negative space around the words can be seen as the unspoken, indescribable feeling of self. It forms a maze that twists and turns through states of being, tracing a lines from abandonment to the outer edges of the circle or vise versa.

 

A further step back from the image, it starts to become a vortex of symbols that shimmers and spins. The illusion that words can describe the spirit.

 

"There is no suggestion that language is involved in our emotional response to some object or event, such as when we react to a beautiful painting or an unpleasant incident. We may use language to explain our reaction to others, but the emotion itself is 'beyond words'.

David Crystal: Language and Thoughts