Feel Something, Make Something : A Guide to Collaborating with Your Emotions

Description

An intimate, quietly revolutionary guide to using art to process, understand, and collaborate with your feelings, from the co-author of My Body, My Home. Understanding our emotions is a lifelong process. Many of us were taught to avoid, suppress, or run away from intense feelings like grief, anger, and sadness. What if, instead of hiding from your emotions, you collaborated with them? Feel Something, Make Something is a guide to experimental, creative self-expression and reflection. Caitlin Metz believes that making art—whether it’s a detailed scribble on a crumpled receipt or a 100-day series of photos—gives your feelings a physical form and provides space to observe them from a distance. To help kickstart your creative process, Metz offers tutorials on zine-making (complete with a pull-out DIY zine to keep in your wallet), drawing, bodymapping, mindmapping, self-portraiture, and writing personal manifestos. This act of creation can be a form of release, documentation, ritual, conversation, or disruption. You may choose to sustain your feeling, to channel it into your work, or to shift it completely. To feel something and make something is both an invitation to take a breath and an opportunity to shift your perspective. Feel Something, Make Something is not about making perfectly polished works of art. The outcome of your art-making is arbitrary. The process is the work. Intro (this page) A lil’ narrative about what art-making has meant to me over the years. Bring your tissues, it’s a real sweet love story. Part One: The Feeling (this page) In this section of the book, I share my two favorite practices for getting in touch with my feelings. First, I use bodymaps (this page) to visualize the sensations within my physical form. Then I empty my thoughts onto the page, creating a mindmap (this page) to make sense of what’s happening in my head. These exercises provide space between me and the Feel so that I may investigate it fully. Part Two: The Making (this page) Once you know what you’re feeling, it’s time to make something about or with it. In this section, I give you a pep talk about creating within the constraints of your everyday life. Then I wax poetic about five functions of art-making that have guided my practice, plus the artists I’m in awe of. And finally, I share how to make a studio wherever you are (this page) and offer up some tutorials of my favorite things to create (this p