Designer Liza Nelson has a love-hate relationship with emoji, and she isn't the only one.
Across the Internet, you can find people who use the little ideograms almost exclusively to express themselves, for better or for worse. So Nelson decided to create a Tumblr called Emoji IRL.LOL..
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"Emojis mean everything and they mean nothing at the same time," Nelson wrote on the site. "They're completely personal and completely universal. They're really quite stupid. And they're the best thing that ever happened to our generation."
The universal nature of emoji drew Nelson into the project. "This whole concept came out of the fact that everybody identifies so strongly with certain emojis, yet everybody interprets and uses them in completely different ways," she told Mashable.
In a way, emojis are the perfect expression of human emotion as they can say things we can't put into words. They can convey joy and pain as well as full, complex conversations. You needn't even speak the same language as the person you're texting to understand one another. But Nelson wanted to take that a step further.
"I wanted to take each of my favorites out of the 20 x 20 pixel context we see them in every single day and imagine them as tangible, 3D objects," she said. "The kind of art and design that moves me the most are images you want to reach out and touch."
Each photograph is a balanced and in-depth study of a tiny emoji. By recreating the cartoonish drawings using real objects, Nelson achieves greater depth, color and detail that's impossible in the original.
The "person bowing deeply" emoji has no mouth, fairly non-expressive eyes and smooth skin. For Nelson's portrayal of it, entitled "Who, Me?", the emoji is brought into the real world with a human's expressive, sheepish face. "I'm really drawn to the emojis with the human element in them because I love using the people in my life and my own body to imitate them," she said.
Nelson has plans for more photographs in the future, including the infamous poop emoji. "It could obviously be created in many ways, and I'm not sure if the natural way fits into my light-hearted vision for this project," Nelson said, adding that she is most excited to create a piece for the emoji of two dancing girls. Her biggest challenge right now, though, is space; she plans to focus on sculpting sculpting and finding emojis until she can find a way to shoot them in a studio.
"At the end of the day, I really just thought it would be a funny commentary on this bizarre, even cheesy, new universal language we all have replaced real sentences with," she said.
Fans can purchase prints on her Tumblr and visit her personal design site.

Images: Liza Nelson/EMOJI IRL.LOL.