Maggie Erwin:

The artist book Mosaic of Feeling is about the relationship between color and emotion, exploring the various ways in which we attribute feelings to color and vice versa. The idea that colors have emotional connotations is widespread-- we often say we're 'feeling blue' to indicate sadness, for example. Mosaic of Feeling is based on a mood calendar, a common tool in cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness practice in which the user fills in each calendar day with a color corresponding to their mood. I chose to expand this concept into an artist book because I wanted to explore the ways we can read color, like we would read text, to understand the emotional state of the maker, artist, or viewer. Each day for fifteen days I created three unique color palettes, corresponding to three pages, once in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Using a twenty-five color oil pastel set, I worked to translate my immediate feelings into colors, letting my hands find each shade before I could process the act. Often, when I felt happy I filled the paper with yellows, my favorite color. When stressed, deep greens. Sadness became strokes of blue and gray. Red corresponded with anger. These forty-five squares represent a mosaic of my feelings from February 23, 2023 to March 9th, 2023. I want viewers of the book to 'read' the colors for their emotional register; the book can be read by flipping each page, experiencing time in discrete moments, or as one long display, creating a continuous illustration, or calendar, of feeling.

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