Sentences

'The hardest battle is between what you know in your head and what you know in your heart'

For our first collaboration project, my class were asked to come up with a sentence or quote we had read and then we paired up and swapped our sentences. The sentence above is the one I reacted to and, to me, it is essentially about the conflict between what we know and what we feel and when put like this I initially thought about inner conflicts. Specifically, my inner conflicts and my relationship with anxiety as my thoughts are at constant war with my deepest desires.

The sentence made me think about Gillian Wearings’ project ‘Signs that say what you want them to say, and not signs that say what others want you to say’ which is about the disconnect between our inner lives and public personas but instead of a disconnect, my sentence is about the conflict between what we know and what we feel. I found the use of text hard hitting and it gave me the idea to write text on my actual body.

My visual reaction to the sentence was a photograph featuring myself with self-deprecating words such as boring, stupid, slut, etc. on my face and neck, and positive words such as kind, calm, pretty, etc. on my chest and arms. The text on my head represents what I know in my head (anxiety), and the text on my body represents what I feel in my heart (deepest desires).

I think my visual response to the sentence given is appropriate, but if I had more time to work on my reaction then I would have covered my whole upper half in text for the option to have different compositions.