Sakina Laksimi an educator, instructional designer, doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and artist. She is currently working on her dissertation on teaching through the pandemic. Sakina has been teaching college courses in media studies, gender studies and education since 2012. She currently works as an instructional designer at Lehman College. 

 

Feelings as creatures is a series of drawings about emotions and the shape of our internal world. Three lessons that emerged for me from doing these series of drawings are: 1) utilize whatever materials and techniques one has access to in order to create art (feelingsascreatures are made using water color paper and sharpies). Leverage materials and objects that feel good, and that you can acquire with ease. In my own life, I have lived by this philosophy that was made more clear to me through drawings: I do not allow constraints to prevent me from creation, though I do acknowledge how those constraints influence my work. 2) There is no wrong or right way of creating art. There is no center, top or bottom. There is only an engagement with and arrangements of texture, color, shape and negative space. Similarly, there is no right or wrong answers/choices in life. “Mistakes” are just the markings that push me to explore new parts of the drawing, and new parts of myself. 3) Art-making is a form of deep self-care. We may access and confront our emotions in safe and reparative ways through creating art. I began this series in 2017 while in the depth of depression and anxiety. Creating these images has been a gratifying activity in touching, seeing, and holding the emotions that live in my body.

The series was named feelings as creatures to express that dynamic relationship between our emotions and our bodies (anger, shame, joy etc) and their embodiment (as autonomous living, breeding beings). Feelings exist in and through our bodies, sometimes foreign and even frightening to us, like alien creatures.