EMOTIONALITY & THE SELF

If your feelings could paint, what would they say?

A mixed-media study of emotion, sexuality, culture and race within the therapeutic encounter.

Exhibited at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Emotionality & the Self emerged from my encounters with the emotional worlds we carry into spaces of healing.

The series moves through questions of sexuality, gendered objectification, race, cultural identity and the strange intimacy of the therapeutic room.

Made using oil, watercolour ink, charcoal and coloured pencil, these works are less interested in explaining emotion than in giving it material form.

Each piece invites viewers to witness the emotional landscape of healing and identity, reflecting the unspoken nuances often experienced in therapy, and in life, especially when the the therapist and the client stem from diverse cultural contexts.

What happens when feeling becomes colour?

When shame becomes texture?

What happens when something we cannot yet articulate becomes an image?

THE creative THERAPY ROOM

Therapy is never occupied by a psyche alone.

We enter it with bodies, histories, cultures, languages, desires, privileges, prejudices and memories.

So does the therapist. Particularly when therapist and client come from different cultural worlds, things can enter the room that are never explicitly spoken: race, belonging, sexuality, power, projection, attraction, otherness.

Emotionality & the Self began inside these tensions. Rather than resolving them, I became interested in what they looked like

Reception and Impact of Emotionality and the Self

The paintings served as both mirror and guide, encouraging therapists and clients to hold complexity without judgment, witness suffering without reduction, and engage with trauma as part of a broader, dynamic healing journey.

Emotion rarely arrives in the categories we give it. Grief can contain desire. Anger can protect tenderness.

Pleasure can coexist with shame. A person can feel powerful and frightened at once.

And healing does not necessarily leave us with a cleaner or more easily explained self. These paintings became a way for me to remain with that multiplicity — without immediately asking it to become coherent.

Perhaps this is what art can sometimes hold better than language: the parts of us that are true at the same time.

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