Self-Directed Project Research

One of the biggest influences for my self-directed project is a survey created to explore how feelings are felt physically.

"Emotions can be overwhelming. But not always so. They affect our thoughts and perceptions far more than we realise. It is well established that we are subliminally affected by visual media, and particularly in terms of unconscious emotions, drives and feelings.

I wanted to question how feeling can be experienced in the body, not simply in mind. I believe that we can use familiar tools to express understanding of experience, and not be restricted to the use of photographic stereotypes.

Can people describe their visceral feelings of emotion visually, and if so, would any patterns arise? In order to answer this, I had to develop some way of asking people to reflect on and describe their private feelings in a simple, repeatable manner, the results of which could be correlated visually and demographically.

By gathering concepts of feeling by word, colour and line and creating visual languages for anger, joy, fear, sadness and love - a kind of democratic visual language is created - a backwards-brand.

As a graphic designer, I am attempting to bring attention to the body's patterns of feeling and innate intelligence in a systematic but playful way.

Over time, this method may be developed into a therapeutic tool, and/or a means of visually representing feeling in an interactive, participatory manner."

Using this research i'd like to create a series of pieces using the bottom two images. I want to do this by using the paint to express visually how emotion effects us in the body.
The reason i wanted to focus on anger is because i believe that it is the strongest and most influential emotion. Personally, i find myself in situations where i would love to express myself freely when angry but it would be inappropriate. I wanted to visually express the way in which humans pent up these intense feelings rather than to react. This may not relate directly to anger, i want the pieces to relate to each individuals held back feelings, maybe even frustration from certain situations.  

http://www.emotionallyvague.com/index.php