book of emotions ANASTASIA SMYK

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The publication Book of emotions is a part of the diploma project at NMA,

Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw, released in 2022.

The diploma supervisor: dr hab. Agnieszka Ziemiszewska.

Book of emotions is a collection of different emotional states showing my personal spiritual transformation based on the way from dark to light through various emotions and feelings. I start my journey with emotions, which are more difficult, dark, cold, less permeable to light and not pleasant at all. From this darkness starts the path to myself and the inner desire to get out of the depressing environment and change something. The colors and emotions of my works do not intensify in a straight line towards the light, but as they do in real life, they fluctuate and resemble the movement of a swing, sometimes falling down into the dark and then rising to the brightness. Further, more and more artworks are filled with light and the internal state begins to return to balance. Finally, at the end of the road, I find peace of mind, acceptance and deeper self-awareness.

‍The book was hand-sewn. It contains 92 abstract paintings, 218 pages, including 20 tracing paper pages, which were pasted individually by hand. The texts are in three languages: Polish, English and Ukrainian.

I wanted to design this book in a way that is difficult to read because it contains very personal texts and experiences, some of the content of which I would like to keep hidden. I tried to make the text perceived as an artistic part combined with an image. I avoided presenting the literary content in a way that dominated its artistic motive.

An integral part of the book's design are my original abstract paintings, which with their form, message and titles refer to a selected set of emotions. The visual part of the publication was complemented with my personal texts from the journal or also my own short poetry.