IT’S OK TO FEEL THINGS is a large-scale public installation currently on view at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden as part of an exhibition exploring mental health.

The structure measures six metres wide and 4.7 metres tall. Rather than presenting emotional life as something private and internal, the work gives it physical scale — allowing feeling to occupy space within a shared civic environment.

Visitors cover the surface with handwritten Post-it notes. These small fragments — confessions, doubts, brief sentences — accumulate over time, forming a growing archive of emotional experiences that rarely enter public space.

The work responds to a simple but persistent observation: many of the struggles people believe are uniquely theirs are, in fact, widely shared. Yet contemporary life often frames distress as an individual weakness rather than something shaped by the environments we inhabit.

As visitors read the notes left by others, a shift begins to occur. What first appears as private struggle gradually reveals a collective emotional landscape.

Through this process, the installation becomes less an object and more a temporary social environment — a space where emotional life is made visible, and where recognition quietly replaces isolation.