Standing at the Heart of a Guilty Conscience

You’ve seen this thing before in dreams you have no recollection of having. With every sin the being takes form. Its heavy breathing synchronized with the rhythm of your heart. Every beat makes it stir, lodged deep within. As uncomfortable as it may be to live with this thing inside, there’s little you can do to cut it out. The most you can do is stop feeding it.

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This print was conceived in an attempt to materilize the abstract idea of the human conscience, and our perception or sin or misbehavior. Sin has religious connotations, and enjoys context that is beyond the scope of this work. However, it is a word universally understood as wrongdoing, or going against the best interest of humanity at large, as well as the individual committing said sin. In exploring the materialization of this idea in drawing a figure such as this one, I contribute to the zeitgeist that attempts to understand it by providing unconsciously contrived symbology that may add or subtract from the overall meaning of the word, depending on the audience looking at the art. The symbols are always ideas that can stand on their own and provide their own meaning, but by putting them together I achieve a visual counterpart to a sentence, each word in said sentence being each symbol. A single-sentence visual narrative appears where each element is sharp, painful, dangerous, uninviting, and yet strangely beautiful in its relatable state. I make the claim that we all have this thing inside of us with the hope that you can relate your own guilty conscience to this creature. We are all sinners after all.