National Parks of Emotion, 2020
The National Parks of Emotion is a participatory multidisciplinary project about how it felt to live through the global pandemic. Through writing and abstract photography, from June 2020 until June 2021, hundreds of people of all ages shared an emotion they experienced during this tumultuous time and the story behind it.
The project was inspired by a meditation by Pascal Auclair for recognizing and managing emotions. Imagining an emotion as a national park—whether it’s the National Park of Uncertainty, Anxiety, or Gratitude—reminds us that no matter how strong a feeling is, we’re just passing through.
Since I’m often drawn to metaphors of geography to help make sense of human experience, I instantly started wondering what each National Park of Emotion might look like. They would each have a different topography, landscape, temperature, and colour palette, but would your National Park of Loneliness look and feel similar to mine?
What if we could collectively and honestly share, through art, what different emotions feel like? Would creating a new visual lexicon documenting the wide variety of emotions we were experiencing make it easier to validate and accept them? I wondered and hoped that bringing people together for a shared meaningful purpose might also help remedy some of the isolation.
Over 2020 and through the first half of 2021, I ran eight online workshops, teaching hundreds of people of all ages how to create and submit their stories and images. People connected, and relationships were formed, with some people returning for multiple sessions and submitting multiple parks.
I’m currently synthesizing the research and seeing what comes next. It’s an evolving project and I look forward to sharing what I discover.
Partners:
A selection of stories from the project:
