Kari Robertson & Tracy Hanna: Young Feelings

1st-30th November 2020

We were hanging out in the garden for the day with baby Simone, talking about children and thinking about how we can respect them for being people as well as kids. We talked about our own upbringings and how they’ve affected us and also were trying to think about how you could treat children in a way where they feel safety and love and can learn to think about emotions with openness.

We talked about how long it’s taken us to learn some things about the world, and how it could be helpful to share some thoughts and questions with young people.

Making an artwork out of this thought has been a funny thing. What you say to a young person can have a heavy weight so we felt we had to be very precise, but at the same time to be fun and also to stay as close as possible to our sentiments, so we were really being honest. We wanted to focus on noticing what feelings can do to us and what it can mean to experience them. Kind of like, “Hey look! Feelings, they’re there, and here! Make space!”