The Burning Hearts
Medium: Wax (red, white, purple), wire, wick
Sculpture Size: 10 x 7 x 5cm
Video: 163MB, 12min 47 sec
Inspiration: Theory of Emotion (Psychology)
These sculptures focus on the accepting of your own emotions. The wax sculptures are of the 5 basic emotions: Love, Happiness, Hate, Fear and Sadness. The wire emotion is hidden within the anatomical heart candle representing feeling as heart is symbolic source of emotions. When the heart burns, it will reveal the hidden emotion. The fire represents the passion, often dangerous and powerful. The wax is similar in colour of blood, so when the hearts will melt, they will give the ‘bleeding’ effect as experiencing certain emotions in certain situations is emotionally damaging, yet we should all allow ourselves to experience them as repression causes even more pain.
The burning hearts represent the development of emotions. While the hearts weren’t the same (slight difference in colour), they looked identical since the hidden wire emotions were not recognizable. Interestingly enough, when the hearts were burning, the strength of flame, patterns of the melting wax and time until they extinguished were very representative of the emotions’ stereotypical nature.
HATE: powerful flame that burned out fast, causing the heart to fall and left blackened/ burnt shot glass
LOVE: very similar to HATE but burned for longer period of time, burnt shot glass on the side turned to
hate
SADNESS: the wax “bled” all over the surface it stood on and caused the heart sculpture to fall second
and the supporting shot-glass was empty and cracked
FEAR: powerful flame at first but burned much longer than the previous 3 emotion in the form of small
flame, left the shot glass full of red wax (reminder of childhood nightmare of room full of blood or
representative of drowning fears in alcohol)
HAPPINESS: was burning for the longest time, the only shot glass that wasn’t stained by flames at all
and filled with the cleanest red wax
