Sometimes Blue
Amy Stewart’s series Sometimes Blue offers a space for sadness. Intended to spark a conversation about the types of feelings we communicate, the pieces reflect Stewart’s wish to have people open up about desolation and grief, or simply to acknowledge freely their experiences with the “blues”. When we don’t address our sadness in public, and when we receive such constant messages to be happy, we end up neglecting more difficult feelings for fear of bringing down or producing discomfort in ourselves or others. As a nod to this social pressure, Stewart gives each piece in her series a happy name, so that Sometimes Blue affirms sadness as a real and necessary experience, one that ought not to be stifled beneath the pressures of happiness. The series emphasizes dark shapes that push against or absorb the sharp lines of happiness—not refusing the possibility of joy, but embracing sadness as its own right.