Otobong Nkanga: We are in a world that people feel, like I do, uncomfortable with tears and watching someone cry. There's a kind of shame of crying. Someone is crying and they cover their faces. Rendering invisible the tears becomes a norm. So I imagined, okay, let's take this teardrop and shift it into a sculptural form. It's almost like you arrest it and then you solidify it at different points in its stage of dropping.
The ropes, they are hand-dyed, hand-crocheted ropes. And then we have the sculptural objects attached. I was thinking of the transparency of the teardrop, but a teardrop that is filled with many emotions. That's why one of the sculptural work is glass and the shift in gradient colors. And on the other side, with the ceramic pieces, how that teardrop becomes loaded, becomes solid.
I was then thinking, what if this teardrop actually had a voice? What would it say? How would it say it? The sound work is really looking at that tear and fragments of emotions that goes with it. If it's happiness, could we think of the sound like, “ha ha ha.” Or is it “hmm” of content? And then, “hmm” could be of sadness. So it could be within that range of “hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.” So this tear is actually revealing, through my voice, this anxiousness slowly slipping into happiness, into anger, into sadness, into just quietness.