Play as a tool for Emotional Exploration & Freedom
by Syon Davis
In a time where we are collectively accumulating trauma, pain, and exploitation, it is important that we are finding ways to express and move through these heavy and overwhelming feelings. From a somatic and scientific view of things, we know that emotions can actually get stuck in the physical body and turn into trauma, which has lasting impacts on our physical and mental health, and can literally kill us.
Play can be a powerful tool for processing feelings and emotions. It can bring down our usual defenses and allow us the space to process nonlinear feelings and thoughts in a less threatening way. Emotions can have an ethereal and intangible quality to them, often making them hard to understand and cope with. When engaging in play, your feelings don’t have to make cognitive sense. You can just feel through them.
Working with, emotional shapes, can be a powerful addition to any creative process. An “emotional shape” is a transmutation and transference of emotion from body to creation; it is the quality or feeling of something that cannot be wholy articulated in words but is evocative in feeling.
For me, this concept is most easily accessed in my dance and movement practice, but is applicable in any medium. There is a lot of space to explore between my body and the spaces that exist between and around it. In a more visual medium, like painting, this might mean experimenting with colors, shapes, textures, and tools, (paintbrush, fingers, leaves, etc) to release the feeling from your body and onto the canvas.
Play can be a powerful tool for processing feelings and emotions. It can bring down our usual defenses and allow us the space to process nonlinear feelings and thoughts in a less threatening way. Emotions can have an ethereal and intangible quality to them, often making them hard to understand and cope with. When engaging in play, your feelings don’t have to make cognitive sense. You can just feel through them.
Working with, emotional shapes, can be a powerful addition to any creative process. An “emotional shape” is a transmutation and transference of emotion from body to creation; it is the quality or feeling of something that cannot be wholy articulated in words but is evocative in feeling.
For me, this concept is most easily accessed in my dance and movement practice, but is applicable in any medium. There is a lot of space to explore between my body and the spaces that exist between and around it. In a more visual medium, like painting, this might mean experimenting with colors, shapes, textures, and tools, (paintbrush, fingers, leaves, etc) to release the feeling from your body and onto the canvas.
Syon is a queer, Black, fat, neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist. Their work is made up of artifacts from their decolonization and rewilding process– an active practice of shifting away from colonialist, anti-black, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, and human-supremacist ways of being and moving towards pleasure, balance, acceptance,and being in right relationship with nature.
Much of their work focuses on reclaiming their identity as a natural being and being in relationship with their body and other creatures as such. They are currently exploring the aforementioned ideas through the mediums of movement, collage, film, animation, textiles, & the written word and at the intersections of those things.
They are one of the founders of Experiments in Freedom, an art collective creating space for people to access and explore creativity, self-nourishment, and connection with nature. Syon was born and raised on stolen land in Pomona, California and resides on stolen land in Portland, Oregon.
Learn more about their work at syondavis.com or follow them @sighbaby_ on instagram & tiktok.