grown-up heart

Grown-up Heart is about the precious sensitivity inside all of us, and the idea that we remain as babies in our hearts—soft, sensitive, and unable to articulate complex ideas through language.

Our hearts babble, repetitively exploring the components of language. Our hearts cry when their fundamental needs are not met: nourishment, rest, comfort. And our hearts explode like joyous finger-paintings when something tickles them just right.

As grown-ups, when it comes to deciphering the language of the heart, we find we have grown apart from a time when we could comprehend that language. Our inarticulate hearts try to remind us to re-connect with our youth, our inner self, or with something we used to know. It isn’t easy to remember that every person we encounter has a sensitive little baby in their heart, too: desperately needing to be soothed, comforted, or tickled just right.

“It isn’t easy to remember that every person we encounter has a sensitive little baby in their heart, too: desperately needing to be soothed, comforted, or tickled just right.”

Grown-up Heart was created in Adobe Photoshop when my daughter was seven months old. I scanned her swirly finger-paint textures, which came to represent a heart, and combined them with a graphic of how blood flows through the heart, a definition, my photo of clouds, and type representing baby sounds.