This practice-based research explores using cuteness as a subjective sensibility to understand emotional buildups that are frequently bottled up within intergenerational relationships.

In the messy metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood, cuteness can provide an angle for critically unfolding how intertwining love, hurt, expectations and the wrong shapes of care would mould our sense of belonging and the images of self.

In cultures where the language of love is frequently expressed in material provisions and less so through spoken words, cute objects are often given as gifts, rewards, and comfort objects. Cuteness with all its endearment, uncanniness and artificiality is entangled within these complex familial events.

In the contemporary explorations of cuteness as a multi-layered aesthetic and affect, cuteness’s complexity is discussed as a network of deliberately ambiguous and constantly paradoxical concepts, in works such as The Power of Cute (2019) and The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2017).

Building on these theories, this research project explores how cuteness can be understood as a set of subjective understanding of tactile and emotional qualities, based on our individual association with cuteness. In this sense cuteness can also exist outside of explicit and conventional cute artefacts. This conceptualisation of cuteness is incorporated in a mixed-media practice of writing, wearable soft sculptures and photography, to address one’s emotional disorientation, woundedness and fragmented selves in the process of growth.

In the formal simplicity of a cute object is the unspeakable entanglement of the suffocating softness. Currently this project is being developed as a PhD proposal.