When one is asked to give form to what they are feeling inside, things get tricky. Although due to social conditioning and twenty years of being part of civilisation – some words and feelings begin to get associated with tastes, colours, shapes and sounds. As if everything is finding its characteristics to make itself more real. A feeling wanting to acquire full form or a smell wanting to have a colour and a shape.

In an attempt to quickly represent any five emotions on a paper, I made marks, marks that looked like calls hoping people would get what I am trying to say. Whenever I am representing or expressing something, I always want people to understand what I mean and say.

The emotions I had chosen were – power, hope, overwhelmed, longing and inspired.
These were the closest to what I was feeling that day and for quite some time before. I started with overwhelming and torn different colour papers. For power, I just smashed a red square paper in the middle of a white sheet. For hope, I drew a yellow sun-like body with circular strokes of the brush. For longing, I made blue elongated marks flying off in different directions. For inspired, I made water because of what it makes me feel.

These emotions were then brought together into a collage – new elements were added to it wherever I saw something needed a change. The overall emotion of the collage I created shouted overwhelming to me so I used black oil pastel to cover parts of it, creating a new layer of shape and texture along the way.

These emotions stayed with me and others throughout. We gave them a body to inhabit and made them dance to a sound. We even gave them a background story thus making them real characters themselves.