Faces beneath my feet

"Pareidolia" is a term used in psychology for the very human process to find faces in inanimate objects. Well before I knew the term, I noticed it in myself as a small child, as I would see faces in everything and would often imagine what kind of character or personality was behind the face and perhaps, how it ended up being there at all. I don't know if other people did this, but as a kid at least, I tended to spend a lot of time by myself and therefore had to have a pretty active imagination to keep entertained.

Today, we pick up where we have left off with the renovation and will begin tearing things apart downstairs. We are keeping as much of the original as we can, including the wooden floors, but we will be painting over them in white, hiding the thousands of faces that are peeking our from the grainnand have borne witness since they were laid, most likely back when the house was built in the early sixties.

We have been living down here while the upstairs has been renovated, and all of these little faces have been constant companions and I have spent some time like I would have as a child, getting to know a few of them that I would see daily. There are foxes and birds, sloths and insects all there for the world to see, if anyone stopped to notice them. Some of them are happy, some curious, some scared, some angry - but each holds a personality and a unique story - in my head.

I don't know about everyone, but I find myself having to create opportunity for imagination more than when I was a kid and I feel it is because my mind is always busy, there is little time for creative thought. My writing is of course one of the spaces I get to free-think, but much of my life is thought-directed by activities. What I have found however is that compared to the years where I was consuming a lot of engineered content, I am far more creative now than I was. It is as if the act of consuming creativity diminished my own ability to create independently. I believe that children are far less creative on average than they were in the past, with much of their imagination actually repetition guided by consumption.

I have an art project in mind for these faces and will photograph more of them over the coming weeks so I can use them later, before they are gone from view under a layer of paint. I don't know if I will ever get around to actually doing it, but in my head it seems like a good idea - which is where creativity begins. Things can be created without thought, but without intention, is it art?

That is something that to be considered for another day, as for now, I have to dive back into activities that steal my attention, so there is precious little bandwidth left to imagine the stories of all the faces I see.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]