How would you describe your feelings at this very moment? Are you happy or sad; elated or melancholy? It could be argued that the spectrum of human emotion is so vast and changeable that it is often impossible to adequately verbalise our mood at any given time. Photographer Polly Brown is one such advocate for this theory, finding commonly used words to articulate emotion to be insufficient.
To remedy this, for her latest series titled Mood Ring, Brown has burrowed into the English dictionary to unearth obscure and archaic terms that might be reintroduced into the everyday lexicon. From ‘hangdog’ (adj. feelings of guilty sheepishness), ‘twitterpated’ (adj. nervously excited or overcome by romantic feelings) and even ‘alexithymia’ (a noun used when ‘one is unable to identify, express or describe one’s feelings’), Brown has also responded to each word with a visual cue; the images residing between the familiar and the surreal, the comedic and the morose, the domestic and the fantastical.