The weight (and lightness) of emotions

This collage was quite different from the other art works in that, unusually, this participant, Hanna, living in the south of England expressed her feelings visually but also through weight. During the Covid pandemic people painted collections of stones with patterns, pictures, and messages. In many ways these were memorials representations of bodily feelings and this participant latched on to this concept of the weight of stones to express her worries in her collage. She says; “Ok so nature was a big part of the lockdown so as you see on the pictures you have ants and flowers and bees, but you can also see some stones from the beach they represent all the challenges so like anxiety, stresses, fear. … there’s friends and homes stones and between it there are like little shiny glass pebbles on the left. So, they represent tears. So, you can see the stone with anxiety, stress, it was really heavy to represent how we felt and all the stresses we kept inside. So, all the emotions I put on the big stones, so I felt really anxious and stressed, panicked even”. We were aware of how these heavy emotions had all been boxed in together whereas all the rest of the collage, the flowers, the beautiful sky and the feather and the nature element are in the open air and are not boxed in. Hanna explains“I boxed them in because that’s how we felt, we had to box everything inside but then do as much as we can to support others and cope. So, boxing all the negative feelings at the bottom of the page”. Within her collage the light and airy feelings and emotions that surround love, family, home, friends are at the top so there is almost a comparison to heaven, “the very light ones are at the top. Hope is like a white stone on the very top right cloud”.