Eliminate the Elephant in the Room

Silence could be seen as a rule for mankind’s survival and multiplication in modern society. However, it creates an ever-growing ‘elephant’ in the room at the same time. This project applies the form of illustration to demonstrate a conversation between the silence and emotional difficulties that people are struggling with in the society. 

This project chooses the perspective of emotions that people are entangled with when they keep silent to conceal facts and displayed by three illustration works. It is summarised with three main emotions: fear, awkwardness and shame. The illustrations are then extracted and generalised from those mental activities. For instance, scared eyes, worms, germs and barriers. After that, by using methods of breaking, deconstructing, cutting, displacing, distorting and rotating from the Deconstruction, the figurative objects are re-created into a new structure. Moreover, the inspiration is from Lebbeus Woods’s architecture. He is expert in deconstructing buildings to explain the new order instead of the origin (Wax, 2014) . It is attractive that the cutting of lines demonstrates the power of confronting the reality. In addition, the illustrations use black and white colours to provide a stronger visual effect of the silence, use different thickness of lines and darkness of shades to contrast and display the fluctuated emotion.

Keeping silence may help people to adapt more to the living environment. However, this is not a permanent solution. The fact that someone wants to hide, will be exposed one day. So it is necessary to guide individuals to think profoundly of the silence and find out the solution, to avoid more negative influence on the ‘elephant’ brought to them.