Boy, Why Are You Crying?
Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Tears come from the heart and not from the brain,” but artist Rose-Lynn Fisher might not agree.
She spent the past few years approaching tears from an artistic and scientific approach to learn if our tears from different occasions and emotions could be distinguished. By photographing tears from different stimuli at a microscopic level, she discovered something incredible about this most basic of human reactions.
In her study, Rose-Lynn writes, “The topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. This series is like an ephemeral atlas.”
Onion tears (Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher)
Start the slideshow below to see how much our tears give away about our emotions without us even knowing, and then SHARE if this truly blows your mind.
Tears of Ending and Beginning
Source: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“The Topography of Tears is a study of 100 tears photographed through an optical microscope. The project began in a period of personal change, loss, and copious tears.”
Tears of Possibility and Hope
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“One day I wondered if my tears of grief would look any different from my tears of happiness – and I set out to explore them up close, using tools of science to make art and to ponder personal and aesthetic questions.”
Onion Tears
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Years later, this series compromises a wide range of my own and others’ tears, from elation to onions, as well as sorrow, frustration, rejection, resolution, laughing, yawning, birth and rebirth, and many more, each a tiny history.”
Tears of Those Who Yearn for Liberation
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
Many nations were built on tears like these.
Tears of Change
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“The random compositions I find in magnified tears often evoke a sense of place, like aerial views of emotional terrain.”
Tears of Elation
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Although the empirical nature of tears is a chemistry of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. This series is like an ephemeral atlas.”
Tears of Grief
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Roaming microscopic vistas, I marvel at the visual similarities between micro and macro realms, how the patterning of nature seems so consistent, regardless of scale.”
Tears of Laughing Till I’m Crying
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Patterns of erosion etched into earth over millions of years may look quite similar to the branched crystalline patterns of an evaporated tear that took less than a minute to occur.”
Tears of Release
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness.”
Tears of Remembrance
Credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher
“Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.”
If you thought these were beautiful and want to learn more about Rose-Lynn Fisher’s art, visit her gallery on The Topography of Tears.