Threads of Thought: The Information Gap

Something I think about a lot in terms of my work is the information gap.

The information gap is the gap of understanding between two or more people.

You will never understand another person's view of the world. You can't. You aren't them. You didn't experience their childhood, their emotional reactions to various life events, their joys or pains.

In teachers college, I had a professor who used the analogy that every student shows up to class with a metaphorical backpack. In that backpack, they bring everything that happened after school the day before and the morning of today. They might experience their parents yelling, they might experience a fight with their siblings, they might have experienced bullying at an after-school activity, or their pet died, or there wasn't enough food at dinner, or they had a perfectly pleasant evening. But the point is that they bring whatever happened the night before and the morning of to the classroom, and you might never be the wiser. Those events and life experiences shape their behaviour and engagement.

You, as their teacher, are experiencing a huge gap in information about your student and are expected to teach them to their needs as best you can.
I think about this idea of the information gap in regard to a lot of things, mainly communication.

Humans are garbage at communicating, myself in particular. To communicate with one another, you need to think about intention, inflection, tone, pace, and timing. You need to have a basic awareness of another person's background and upbringing to understand how they developed their own communication skills. Then you need to be aware of yourself. Aware of your own triggers and traumas, your own biases, education, experiences and lack thereof, your ego, and when your ego stops you from truly listening and understanding.

Now let's look at that information gap and terrible communication alongside complex individual human experiences and emotions.

I express very complex feelings in my art. When I painted the three water pieces in 2024, I wasn't painting or interpreting "depression." I was trying to express a loss of innocence, reconciling with the truth, the feeling of despair so deep in your soul that it changes you permanently, the feeling of being so suffocated by your own pain that you are drowning, endless crying, endless sorrow, and endless grief for a new understanding of the world that you never asked for.

Those three paintings were my desperate attempt to both express all of those emotions, and more, as well as process them, come to terms with them, and heal from them.

walking bag of water, 2024

bathed in fluid and incased in a hard shell, 2024

puddle that once was you, 2024

But I don't think I communicated those feelings successfully in those paintings. There was a gap in information and communication that didn't express those emotions to the fullest extent for another human to truly and honestly pick up on.

An artistic goal of mine is to try to bridge the information gap as best I can over my lifetime of creating.

Something I am looking to explore in the coming years is sound. I want to appeal to as many human senses as I can in my artwork in hopes of bridging the experience gap. While I am currently working in the visual, using colour to express and communicate through sight, next I want to use sound with visuals to further heighten the experience.

Now, I have no musical ability. I do not know how to play an instrument. I am not particularly good at singing. But I am preparing myself to learn. My goal for this year is to buy a keyboard and start taking piano lessons.

I find music evokes an emotional experience in me. I have spent many concerts crying. The Cinematic Orchestra with Patrick Watson singing "To Build a Home" makes me cry almost every time. When I saw that song live, I ugly cried into my husband's shoulder and experienced a new revelation about the importance of that song to me as a human being with consciousness.

So my long-term goal for my work is to incorporate two senses, the visual and the auditory. To slowly immerse the viewer in an emotional landscape that evokes an emotional experience.

I think colour can do that through its historical and cultural relevance and its connection to the dawn of evolution. I don't think we need physical objects or realistic interpretations to bridge that information gap. If anything, by adding those physical objects or realistic interpretations, you are adding more opportunities for misinterpretation, as every culture and every person will bring their metaphorical backpack of understanding to those visuals, taking away from the shared emotional experience.

I will never be able to eliminate individual interpretation. And it is true, once you release an artwork into the world, it is no longer yours. But how interesting is it to attempt to share your feelings with the world by trying to recreate that emotion for others to feel for themselves?

I don't know if I will ever be successful in this goal. I likely never will be.

But maybe I get close. Maybe a handful of people will experience something similar to what I experienced, and the information gap won't be as wide for a single moment. What might that mean for human connection in a world so emotionally disconnected? What might that mean for teachers trying to reach students or doctors trying to understand the pain of a patient?

I think about the information gap a lot, and I hope to make that gap smaller through art.