Melissa Sarris

I worked on the BitterSweet project with three local groups: Apogee peer support group, teens at the Youth Clubhouse of Hudson, and incarcerated men and women at the Columbia County Jail. Workshops participants experimented with ways to translate personal emotion into abstract drawing and sculpture. They developed an understanding of abstraction, using shapes, colors and forms to represent ideas and emotions. 

 

During workshop sessions participants started with two-dimensional art materials and began learning this translation by drawing various types of lines – straight, curvy, dotted, jagged, thick/thin – and then discussing what emotions were evoked. The groups worked collectively and individually through several iterations of this exercise. Next, Iintroduced a three-dimensional material: air-drying modeling clay and discussed its visual and tangible properties. Participants were asked to select a specific emotion word and then create an abstract form to depict it. I asked questions such as, “Is your word smooth or rough? Regular or uneven? Tall or Short?” to help facilitate this translation. Once the clay works had dried, participants painted them with acrylic paint, adding another layer of meaning.

 

After the workshops I created chocolate bar molds that express an amalgamation of the ideas explored in the workshops. These were cast as small edible sculptures by Vasilow’s chocolate shop in Hudson, NY, that were given to participants at a public engagement event at the Hudson Area library.