Thoughts about Anger

future notes will be revisited and updated as I go along, they are a place for me to start ideas, to map my thoughts, to consider things in the context of other things… this one was started on 13th August…

I think about anger a lot, mostly because it is often seen as a ‘bad emotion’ or more regularly – especially by men — not an emotion at all. But anger in itself feels perfectly valid. I get angry, we all get angry.

This essay by Tunmise Adebowale tell the story of an anger that seethes under the surface. I love the way she writes, the softness with which she presents her story of anger to us.

It makes me think about how we often associate how we express the emotion with the emotion, rather than the feeling of the emotion itself. When we think about anger we think of shouting and punching things, when we think about happiness we think of smiling and laughing and then there are all of the other things in between (not that these are opposites of each other, but there’s usually a distinct distance between the two.), would we consider a person who is angry but smiling, someone who is happy but has no expression on their face.

Yes those people exist (obviously) but they aren’t the first people we’d imagine.

If we remove the visual of the way that we express the emotion, what are we left with? How does anger look if we can’t see the body?

Grey Rock Method I, Installation at ASC Lambeth, 2023

Now that I’m thinking about it (and this is why these notes are invaluable), I’ve already been working with anger, well actually with the Grey Rock Method, it was about the absence of emotion. Is this the same as visualising emotions, or the complete opposite?

Either way, this is something to revisit.