Art in tears

In 2010 Rose Lynn started a new project based on dried human tears in different situations, like joy, grief and irritation. Her project is called The Topography of Tears.

She studied  more than 100 tears from different people and situations ,she dried it and take photos of the view from the microscope.

And she found that basal tears( the ones our body produces to lubricate the eye) are different from the tears that come out from hard laughter or the tears that happen when we are chopping onions.

Onion tears

“I started the project about five years ago, during a period of copious tears, amid lots of change and loss—so I had a surplus of raw material,” She says. Because of that and the idea of “ everything we see in our lives is just the tip of the iceberg,visually”  she wonder  how a tear looks like close up.

Release tears

Joseph Stromberg of the Smithsonian’s Collage of Arts and Sciences explained that there are three different types of tears: basal, reflex and psychic.

Basal tears are the one s in our eyes all the time , and  have  function of  lubricating and protecting the eyes.

The second type  of tears , named reflex tears, are form to protect the eyes from irritants, like wind , smoke or onions.

Grief tears

Those two kind of tears are chemically different from each other.

The third type, psychic tears , are the ones related with emotions. Studies may reveal that this type has more proteins than the other two.

Remembrance tears

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