Teardrops
Can (visual) art step in where (scientific) language leaves off?
Teardrops is a series of 12 visual landscapes created in response to the chemical composition of human tears. Modern humans can now describe a teardrop with precision, naming its elements and structures. However, what it cannot yet fully capture are the layered emotional conditions that bring those tears into being. This work attempts to visualize the complexity, ambiguity, and multiplicity of the states of human emotion.
Full synthetic Image . Made with in digital 3D space with Blender
The project began with a scientific list of twelve components that make up a drop of human tear: mucin, glucose, immunoglobulins, lacritin, lactoferrin, lipids, lipocalin, lysozyme, potassium, sodium, urea, and water. This breakdown is fascinating for its precision and how it also reveals what it cannot fully explain: the emotional conditions that produce tears. We are able to map what is inside the teardrop, but the complexity that brings it into being remains out of reach.
What interests me is how this gap extends onto the limitations of language and structure as a whole. Words inevitably categorize, simplify, and sort, but the lived reality of emotion is fluid, contradictory, and unstable. Here I draw Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, rhythms, intensities, and impulses that exceed the symbolic order of language. Teardrops positions itself in this in-between. The twelve digital landscapes are intentionally abstract and unresolved, avoiding the closure of language and objective representation.
