Metanoia is a stop-motion animation film from the Weaving Flower Series painstakingly illustrated and created in the first quarter of 2022.
The one minute and thirty seconds short film consists of approximately five hundred and eight digital drawings. Metanoia is a Greek word meaning the transformative change of one’s heart and mind.
The transformation begins as the flowers go through the season of flowering and seeding. Resembling the form of nerve cells neurotransmitters, the stems of the flowers weaved and entangled. The seeds of the flowers represent the mind’s thoughts, taking the form of the human brain migrating from the seed pods to the ground, morphing into Monarch caterpillars and through another cycle of change -the metamorphosis.
At the end of the transfiguration brings a pair of wings for the new creature, taking the form of a butterfly; the thoughts of the renewed mind take flight and land on a beating heart.
In the search for inner peace, I often wrestle with myriads of negative voices in my head countless times a day. Questions of the unknown caused tumultuous anxieties and breathlessness casting shadows over me and haunting me in my sleep. In my desperation, I found an escape through the repetitive motions of drawing, and through illustrating the visual landscape of my mind, I was healing myself.
I attempted to investigate the dynamics of landscape, including manipulating its effects and the limits of spectacle based on my assumptions of what the “landscape of the mind” looks like. Rather than presenting a factual reality, I reimagined the process of Metanoia for myself poetically; whether the process has or hasn’t begun already, I have gotten closer to enlightenment than I was yesterday.