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Emotional Support Workbook is a series of exercises that asks the audience to examine their feelings through playful activities.

ESW is an on-going project. A collection of interactive exercises, I use wordplay and mindfulness techniques as references. The resulting activities encourage the exploration of our range of emotional capacity. Initially, it started as a way for for me to contextualize my own negative feelings and work on empathy as a skill. Since then, it has become a playground of different ways to express affect and related connotations.

Things I think about:

What does a feeling sound like? How does it feel inside our bodies? What does it weigh? In words? In colours? In mark-making? How does This make you feel? Or That? Why feel anything at all?

In September 2019, S.A.I.L. gave me space to show some of this work:

People Are People: A fill-in-the-blank postcard, people are people wanted to see what kind of people exist, and how people-hood can be played with using adjectives and other kinds of words.

Absolutely Infuriating: A writing exercise, people wrote down their angry feelings and tossed them into a vase. I personally find Anger to be an uncomfortable feeling, to both feel and to perform. I hoped for us, artist and participants, to find some relief through letting go of our anger.

I have other ESW things cooking, and am looking for the right way to introduce them to folks.

Creating interactive work is very rewarding. But it requires an audience, to truly reach completion.

(2018, Ongoing)