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Making Objects as Emotional Responses

By using a series of probes as an initial trigger, I was able to begin a conversation through pictures and short stories based on the pictures. Pictures were exchanged via email approximately once a week. The pictures my mother shared were small details of a shared space in my home in Greece, and I shared similar details from my house in the UK.

I asked my mother to take pictures of the different details of the room and write a few words for each picture. I was sending back pictures and details from my room in the UK (alongside a supporting narrative to my mother) in response to the pictures I received. The probe kit and the way my mother had to respond to the kit made both of us respond to each other in a creative way.

Following on from the conversations that took place as part of the design probes, I screen-printed some of my mother’s pictures. By doing this, I was able to compare the details of my childhood room with my house in the UK. My mother, on her side, started creating narratives to encourage me by using pictures of my childhood alongside a corresponding story.

Apart from the fact that we are both using our creative practice, we found ways of connecting with each other and share feelings and emotions. The details that we both focused on were things that linked us. The images show examples of how we both started responding creatively to the material we were receiving.

In one of the initial photos sent by my mother of my room in Greece, I spotted her slippers under my desk. My response to this photo was to screen-print and enlarge this detail. In these photos I started to encounter static reminders of home that I did not feel connected with. Over the years whilst I was still living in Greece I changed the colour of the walls regularly and this was an important detail that I wanted to add to the photos. In order to achieve this detail, I started to screen-print sections of the photos that were being sent to me and I sent these images back to my mother. The floor tiles were another detail; however, these remain unchanged and became an anchor in the prints.

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