2015

The Normal Heart

This is a response I produced based on the film The Normal Heart. It is based on the Broadway play of the same name, and depicts the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1980’s New York City. I found not only the film to be emotional, poignant and jarring, but also the name of it itself. The idea of, and the imagery conjured by the phrase - “normal heart” - was something that I wanted to explore. The film dealt very openly with both homosexuality and homophobia, and it struck me that if you had simply a human heart in front of you, you would have no idea if that person was gay or straight, black or white, or perhaps even male or female. I also found it interesting that the heart is so often depicted as the organ responsible for love, which linked to ideas explored within the film as to what qualifies as a “normal” love. I based my response initially on fingerprints; I felt that, in way that was similar yet more developed in regards to the notion I had explored about the identity of a single human heart, a fingerprint can hold an entire identity, yet also give away nothing of it. I decided to explore that further. Using a photograph of one of my fingerprints in ink, I lifted the image and turned it into a heart. I wanted to try to represent the question that the film title had caused me to ask myself - “what is a normal heart?”.  I then wrote various words depicting different races, religions and sexual orientations in each of the hearts, all with a question mark. I wanted to convey the both the idea that you cannot judge who a human is based on their heart, and also the idea that fundamentally we all have a heart, we are all human and we are all equal. I ultimately felt that the illustration worked best as a mock up of an equality poster produced by a charity such as Stonewall.