How Bitter the Taste
This project, titled “How Bitter the Taste,” is a woven piece that highlights the effects of anxiety on the body and mind. It speaks of the experience of trying to hold yourself together even though you feel like you’re falling apart; of frantically pulling the fragmented pieces together to make you feel whole and safe again. With its fraying edges, I aimed to show that even though you may think you are okay holding your broken pieces together by yourself, eventually you will realize how unsustainable that is and that you really do need to reach out for help.
This project is inspired by a song titled “Trust” by the band Half Alive, which is about the difficulty of trusting God in uncertainty and hardship. The title of this piece is a reversal of a line in this song that goes, “How sweet the taste of certainty.” The anxiety and fear that stem from the unknown show just how bitter uncertainty really is, and I wanted to highlight this in my project. I have recently been dealing with unprecedented fear and anxiety, causing stomach knots and fatigue that I have never experienced before. This project is an attempt to voice that experience through art, continuing my exploration of creating work based on my personal life and emotions.
For this project, I wove together images of bruises, water, and wind-blown plants since these things evoke a sense of uncertainty in me. You don’t always know where bruises come from or how quickly they will heal. You don’t know what lies in murky lakes or in the middle of the ocean. You don’t know where the wind comes and goes. I wanted to include images of bruises as a reference to another lyric in this song that goes, “Lord, help me, there’s a thorn in my side/I feel the tension of the fear and truth/I carry life in between the divide/But all the wrestling has left me bruised.” I wanted to show that just as bruises are evidence of a physical wound, anxiety is evidence of a psychological wound: insecurity.
