Framing Chaos is an exploration of how we use emotion, memory, and experience to turn personal chaos into forms of order.
Framing Chaos is an exploration of how we use emotion, memory, and experience to turn personal chaos into forms of order.
Framing Chaos investigates the ways in which we create meaning, and form understanding of our external and internal worlds through the framing and reframing of our perspectives and experiences. This project was born as a direct result of a personal exploration and reflection that involved turning my attention inward to observe the often subconscious motivations that guide my living and making practices. I explored the role that experience, emotion, and memory play in the process of navigating our beliefs and perceptions using documentation, fragmentation, and reconstruction as methods for navigating and giving form to these inner landscapes. I found that the act of documentation was one of the driving practices that has fueled not only this project, but my creative drive since I was very young. As a kid, documentation took the form of scrapbooking, a collaging of memories through kept tickets, photos, and scraps of anything with a story attached to it. At its core, this act of gathering and arranging inadvertently was my way of creating meaning in chaos, of creating a personal system of order that I could relate to and hold on to. This instinct to document as a means of understanding has stayed with me, and has become foundational to my thesis.
0.1 HOUSE KEYS
In Framing Chaos, I extended my instinct for documentation by scanning surfaces and textures found in places I’ve called home. I realized throughout this project that objects and spaces have always held deep importance to me as vessels of emotion and memory. This collection of scans became a visual library, isolating fragments of personal experience to create an atmosphere of familiarity through abstraction. The surfaces I chose to capture intimately reveal the embedded emotional associations that each texture inherently carries.
0.2 FRAGMENTATION/ MEMORY
Building from the scans, I explored fragmentation and reconstruction by physically weaving together prints of textures from different homes. The physical intertwining of the fragments from two distinct surfaces became a therapeutic act of recontextualizing, a process reflective of how experience and time intersect in memory.
0.3 QUEBRA- CABEÇA
To bring this exploration to life, I translated it into a jigsaw puzzle, using fragmented textures as pieces that form a new whole. Creating a puzzle felt essential, as the process of assembling it mirrored the stages of thinking, analyzing, and intuitively piecing together elements that I experienced throughout this project. The act of putting the puzzle together reflects the process of collecting, connecting, and finding structure within chaos. Each piece is independent, yet together they interlock to create a unified whole. This reflects how I came to see chaos and order- not as fixed or clearly defined states, but as fluid relationships we shape through the ways we choose to piece things together.