The exercise introduced during the session was to select about five emotions within a short span of time. The emotions could be selected on the first thought in mind. The emotions that I listed included peace, confusion, anger, fear, and loneliness.

The very first attempt at the exercise was during the session itself. The task was to represent the listed emotions using any medium, irrespective of being two-dimensional or three-dimensional. For each emotion, we were given thirty seconds, to represent them. Without disclosing our emotions, each of us showed our particular representation on the screen.

After being able to represent those emotions, the second part of the session involved understanding those representations. Each of the participants was to guess the emotion they felt when they saw my representation and vice versa. I feel this was the part where I got a better hold of the importance of color, thickness, mediums, and how they affect one’s understanding to interpret something. Each of us even discussed the reason for our assumption, and then how it differed from the main emotion behind a particular representation, whether mine or my fellow participants.

Now that the emotions selected were represented individually, the next step of the exercise was introduced. We were all supposed to make a collage of all the five representations. The emotional representations were to be connected together in the form of a collage based on how our mind interprets them. Each step was to be documented for the process.

Concerning our discussions on the first attempt at the collage, wherein I lacked a certain sense of connection between the emotions, and some representations were understood in literal meaning, I attempted the exercise again, in various permutations and combinations. The basic idea of representation of the emotions selected wasn’t changed entirely, however it varied in terms of the scale of those representations.

My initial step was to establish a relationship between the emotions. It was necessary to maintain the essence of a collage. I started with the strongest emotion of anger and tried to establish the relationship with confusion, considering both emotions lead to one another. The third emotion was fear, which I feel is not directly linked to anger but to confusion. My own experience says that fear leads to confusion and sometimes, even vice versa.

The remaining emotion of peace was something positive in contradiction to all the first three emotions. Peace, in this case, acts as a connection to all of the negatives, wherein there comes a point where one runs towards peace through anger, confusion, or even fear.

The last one was loneliness. Keeping the literal meaning aside, the next step of the negative emotions of anger, fear, and confusion should be peace. But, all of these negativities also arise due to loneliness. The way I feel, someone can be lonely because of one’s anger, confusion, or fear, but also the reverse is possible. All the combinations achieved during the process of collage making was with these thoughts and ideas.