Grown-up Heart
Grown-up Heart is about the precious sensitivity inside all of us, and the idea that we remain as babies in our hearts: soft, sensitive, and unable to articulate complex ideas through language.
Our hearts babble, repetitively exploring the components of language. Our hearts cry when their fundamental needs are not met: nourishment, rest, comfort. And our hearts explode like joyous finger-paintings when something tickles them just right.
As grown-ups, when it comes to deciphering the language of the heart, we find we have grown apart from a time when we could comprehend that language. Our inarticulate hearts try to remind us to re-connect with our youth, or with something we used to know. It isn’t easy to remember that every person we encounter has a sensitive little baby in his or her heart, too: desperately needing to be soothed, comforted, or tickled just right.
Grown-up Heart was created in Adobe Photoshop when my daughter was seven months old. I scanned her swirly finger-paint textures, which came to represent a heart, and combined them with a graphic of how blood flows through the heart, a definition, my photo of clouds, and type representing baby sounds.