Meaninglessness

This piece (last image), titled "Meaninglessness", is about how communication barriers can make conveying meaning difficult. It was inspired by my experiences, in London during the pandemic, of not being able to properly perceive the faces or emotions of people wearing masks, so it was difficult for me to create meaning from their expressions. In the beginning, some research I did led to experiments with sensory limitations where I covered my face with masks. Thus, I scratched out my eyes in the work to represent parts of other people’s facial emotions and messages that I could not perceive, which was another response to the results of the experiments. The washed-out rainbow colours represent a lack of true expression and emotion. There is a hidden layer of connotation in the work, all the faces except mine are unrealistic fake images synthesized by an artificial intelligence program, and these meaningless existences represent the ‘faceless’ people who surrounded me and were unable to give me meaning.