As someone who loves print I feel it’s essential for me to involve this within this project. As my concept is emotional, I wanted to explore the art therapy concept further, as my colour palette evokes emotion based on colour association I wanted to take this forward with mark-making.
Looking at my previous prints I wanted to have the same expressiveness and fun feel. How could I involve mark-making and emotion?
I decided to physically start recording my emotions everyday. Looking at the colour association, I dedicated a colour to an emotion and everyday using mark making to record how I was feeling. This also was another way of gathering data especially since I do suffer from anxiety. By adding marks a day, it gives the print series a sense of mystery as you cant plan how it’s going to look. This relates heavily to the unpridictable nature of covid-19 and anxiety, anxiety suffers are constantly worrying about the future similarly to the public worrying about corona.
The example above was created during the mini lockdown of students. The blue evokes sadness, being alone in a flat for four days getting lonely, I decided to use windsor ink and a ruler, the ruler drags the blue almost as if Nicola is dragging out the lockdown and extending my sadness. I paired this with a crayon to give the piece some texture, the repetitive marks signify the sadness repeating itself over the course of the day. I decided to pair this with watered down lilac paint, this was covaying optimism, trying to stay hopeful with a mind full of negative thoughts. The paint being watered down creates a sense of worry, yes I’m optimistic but I’m still worrying for the future. I decided to have things overlapping to link to my samples, as the ruffles in the samples overlap so to does my emotions, constantly feeling the same emotions but also not quite knowing how to feel.
This in a visual recording of my emotions over a period of two days. You can see the difference of emotions I was feeling, The black being the stand out on day 1 meaning I had a lot of fear towards the rising number of covid patients. This again overlaps the pink and the purple as I was hopeful but above all fearful. I plan to everyday record how I’m feeling to create a stunning visual diary of an anxiety suffers mind.
lrichar3
This is a good direction to compliment your structural textiles. Have you used heat transfer papers and disperse dyes? it might be good to book a space in the print room to prepare some disperse dye prints that you could then weave or crochet with? You may also wish to add some of these prints in as complimentary flatter textiles behind , or attached to the knitted and woven pieces when you are creating your hybrid samples?