The
emotional
interior,
rendered.
I investigate how generative systems approximate human emotion. Informed by the DSM-5, neuroscience, and a needle threaded with embroidery floss.
Each work begins with a clinical question: how does a diagnostic framework — the DSM-5 — translate into visual form when filtered through a generative system? The research sits at the intersection of psychology, machine perception, and the limits of language.
“Abstraction as an entry point for machines to approximate emotional nuance.”
The works are not illustrations of mental illness. They are studies in translation — what is gained and lost when psychological experience moves from clinical text, through algorithmic interpretation, and into hand-stitched image.
Diagnostic criteria for a specific disorder become the starting point. The language is precise, categorical, resistant to image — which is exactly why it is interesting.
An ecosystem of generative tools attempts to render the criteria visually. The results reveal what machines associate with grief, compulsion, anxiety.
Extensive editing in Adobe Illustrator pushes the image toward exactness — not photorealism, but fidelity to a psychological state.
Printed on canvas, then sewn by hand using a technique learned in the funeral industry. Suturing: the act of holding something together that has been opened.
Available Art
“If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
20x20 canvas with hand generated gilding and embroidery. Imagery reflective of the DSM - 5 diagnostic criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. Gold detailing representative of the Circle of Fifths musical theory and relates a tonal representation mirroring the DSM diagnoses.
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau
16x20 canvas with hand generated gilding and embroidery. Imagery reflective of the DSM - 5 diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia. Gold detailing representative of the Circle of Fifths musical theory and relates a tonal representation mirroring the DSM diagnoses.
“…and, besides, what was left to say
these days
when the unspeakable was out there being spoken,
exhausting all sympathy?
Yet, feeling it, how difficult to keep
the face's curtains closed..”
― Stephen Dunn
8x8 canvas with hand generated gilding and embroidery. Imagery reflective of the DSM - 5 diagnostic criteria for Social Anxiety Disorder. Gold detailing representative of the Circle of Fifths musical theory and relates a tonal representation mirroring the DSM diagnoses.