Image from a visualising interoception workshop
Stress influences the way we perceive pain. Our worry associated with pain, especially if the pain is long lasting, can make it worse. There is a feedback loop that will eventually lead to anxiety and depression and it is this feedback loop that I am hoping to break when I work with people who have experienced severe pain.
Making votives alerted me to the fact that rituals and objects associated with them could be used to take away the pain or distress associated with a difficult experience. A votive materialises a thought, it congeals around a feeling and gives it literal weight. Once objectified, the votive releases the feeling from the person and can pass it on, become a holder for it or become a channel for the intervention of a higher power. The psychology of the situation involves the release of the trauma from the person who is suffering and 'takes their mind off it', as one of the people I was working with put it.
Votive made for someone with chronic lung problems
Making votives led me to have to devise rituals for their use. However I didn't take that aspect of the work seriously, until by chance I met John Fox and Sue Gill, of Welfare State International and when John Fox saw what I was doing he wondered if I could extend the votive idea into rituals for funerals, something he and Sue Gill had been doing for some time. I was somewhat in awe of them, as I knew of the amazing work they had done over the years and was honoured to feel that John thought what I was doing interesting. Their 'Dead Good Guides' are designed to work in real situations and to show how art can be seamlessly integrated into the lives of everyone. I never did get to show him what I came up with, because he died not long after our meeting, but he had impelled me to move my work on and to really think about how and why my work should be more available and accessible to everyone, not just people from the art world. Not long after meeting John I had to attend a funeral of someone who had been cremated and it was obvious that people didn't really know what to do with the ashes. So my first venture into the territory was to think about rituals and associated objects, that might help people come to terms with the problem of how to dispose of someone's ashes.
Sketchbook page used to communicate the idea
Votives made to hold a body's ashes after cremation
The shell-like
objects above are made very simply using pinched clay, which is then fired. Although I made these, the idea is that they should either be made well beforehand by someone before they die, or in response to a post funeral need, by a close relative or friend. Making small objects like these with your hands is an easy thing to do and the process solidifies imprints of every maker's fingertips into each object. Designed
so that they can be easily pushed into the earth like a seed pod, they are closed
with sealing wax or modelling wax to keep the ashes in. You can also make these seed or shell like shapes in the form of a necklace. One aspect of a pre-ritual workshop is to get the people involved to agree how these objects will be used. The more religious will perhaps want to use them like traditional votives, whereby a candle is lit and prayers said. If so these ash containers can be made into candle holders or have a wick inserted into their hollow insides. Mourners may want to add specific elements that remind them of the person who they wish to celebrate; before they release their relative or friend back into the earth or waters they came from. The more that people get involved the better.
The ritual of letting go: Skimming votives off into the water
Ceramic votive in the form of a skimming stone filled with ash and sealed.
Another form these ritual objects can take, is that of skimming stones. Again made out of fired clay, two shallow concave forms are put together to make a 'skimming stone'. A hole is left in one side which allows ashes to be inserted and once that has been done, again wax is used to seal the hole, before the final ritual skimming of the ashes out into a lake, river or sea.
From a sketchbook page used to communicate the idea
The work with votives always involves a drawing led conversation and that conversation leads to the visualisation of a desire or need. This is very emotional. The study of interoception grew out of this work and it has made me very aware that emotions are built within the body, that they are physiological responses to both interior and exterior change. When trying to visualise somatic awareness, I have begun gradually to build up a language of forms that have emerged from both workshops and one-to-one drawing conversations; conversations that are centred on the correspondent agreeing that it is possible to develop an image of their feelings, in a not too dissimilar way to how a police artist would sit with an observer of a crime and work with them to construct an identikit image of the perpetrator. Is it more like this...or like this...? The good thing about this approach is that the person involved doesn't need to know anything about art, they just need to make basic yes/no decisions.
Which of these two drawings is more like the feeling you are trying to describe?
We often start with a simple comparison drawing such as the one above. Then rough drawings are made as the patient begins to open out about what they feel and we begin to sort out what is possible.
Initial drawings done during a first meeting
Where is the feeling located?
Then we move on to where is it located in the body. Once I think I have enough information, I take the drawings back to the studio and then work them up. They are then scanned and turned into digital images and printed off. I bring these back to the hospital a week later and these images then become what is critiqued by the patient and ideas as to colour and its effect are developed.
Annotated images developed with two different patients
As conversations move on I often get to visualise concepts such as how pain moves through the body. Typically this is described by participants as being like a zigzag of lightening. In the case of the image below I was asked to imagine a field of lightening that was also like a spider's web.
An idea worked up as a digital print
The final stages often require several changes, especially as colour is such an emotive aspect of visual language. At this stage images are digitally developed using Photoshop, which allows changes to be kept, because sometimes the patient wants me to take the image back to an earlier stage and it is so much easier to change colours. The digital version also allows me to print off copies for the patient to keep and they can be shown to other interested people.
Image with annotations as reminders of the story behind it
The final image
Although I hadn't consciously tried to predict the visual shape of the final outcome, in several cases I realised that because we were dealing with the visualisation of normally hidden feelings, that this was not that dissimilar to visualising hidden energies. Patients would talk about the release of an electric charge within their body, or waves of emotion, descriptions that reminded me of the way that earlier researchers had described what they were discovering when they attempted to visualise invisible energies, such as the Odic force.*
In my own work, whereby I tried to visualise personal somatic experiences, such as a difficulty I had breathing due to covid19, I had also sensed that I needed to visualise a certain flow of energy, in this case how it was compacted and then released due to a blockage.
The moment of a breath breaking into the lungs from a previously closed throat
My academic research has over the last few years looked into earlier attempts to visualise hidden or invisible forces. Initially I looked at visualisations that were the products of quasi-religious thinkers associated with Theosophy, partly because I knew that their work had influenced artists such as Kandinsky and Klee. However I gradually found more scientific thinkers and as I looked into their theories, I began to feel that there was a real need for a belief system that could explain why we feel as if there is something mystical about the universe. When researching older areas of esoteric thinking, that have now being debunked by science, such as geometrical psychology, Rayonism and other para-scientific theories, I began to see certain common beliefs, that might not have stood the test of time, but which do reflect an intuitive set of feelings that point to some sort of vibrational understanding of our reality.
Visualisation of Chakras: From Leadbeater
The idea of chakras, the concept of body auras or the captured energy fields as seen in the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and the shapes of thought forms, are all attempts to visualise the invisible energies that flow through our bodies. Both colour and sound are vibrational energies and there are many examples of how sound can calm the soul and although the research surrounding colour theory is far less clear in terms of how effective colour can be in creating or changing mood, I have no doubt that colour's vibrational energy does effect emotional change. However after working with a wide range of people, I now realise that colour response is very personal and that it is not something that effects everyone's emotions in the same way. But that doesn't mean I cant use it, in fact because it is so personal, it opens a door for idiosyncratic visual responses to deep inter-personal communication and one-to-one conversations, which is where most of my work is initiated. I don't though normally have to agree with someone else if my imagery is communicating. Outside of the work in the hospital, I am free to take the imagery wherever I feel it needs to go. The construction of meaningful to myself colour communications has become an essential aspect of my recent work and although colour is hard to pin down, so are emotions and the more I go on to work in this area, the more I feel that it is in the struggle to find an authentic colour voice for a feeling, that I will find a something that allows me to communicate whatever it is that I need to communicate.
This image emerged from conversations about poor circulation in a leg
In my drawing conversations with people I often hear that they feel anxious, a state of mind that in Chinese culture is sometimes understood as a type of inner body chaos, or the blowing of 'internal winds' and sometimes their descriptions of the internal state of their bodies are less like a medical anatomy diagram and more like an immersion into a strange landscape or contact with alien energies. In Chinese medicine, our bodies are regarded as elements of and inseparable from, the natural world. We are an embodiment of the Earth and the Universe, the patterns of internal change that occur in our bodies, resonate with the external forms of landscape. All are manifestations of the universal Qi, the “substratum of the cosmos,” the essential quality of being, that I personally think of as another type of underlying vibration.
An animation of an inner body form
Each of these understandings allows me to develop imagery. By working with a range of overlapping viewpoints I can cross fertilise ideas and allow myself the luxury of imaginative play, whereby I 'freeform' with the visual elements that I have surrounded myself with in the studio and play with various interconnections as they reveal themselves.
The more I work with others, the better prepared I am to set up workshops designed to help people develop their personal interoceptual visual language. These workshops have often involved communicating the things learnt during my one-to-one drawing conversation sessions. I work with people in pairs, helping them to respond to each other's growing awareness of a chosen interoceptual feeling. People often chose a painful experience to try to visualise, but someone in a group will quickly realise that it could be a pleasurable feeling or a very different feeling, such as one that gives you goose bumps, that could be explored. I always encourage this as my research is about the benefits of a wider awareness of interoception than just pain. Craig, in his article 'How do you feel?', a paper that he went on to develop as an excellent book with the same title, points to an awareness of
interoception being central to our feelings of being alive and
that it is essential to our development of a subjective image of our sentient
selves across time. He demonstrates how important interoceptual feelings are and shows how they are inseparable from the way the body knows itself and that emotions are inextricably linked to everything from muscle tone, to a need to go to the toilet. I'm writing this post from a hotel bedroom in Gothenburg in Sweden, having just spent the last three days at a conference devoted to the current medical understanding of issues related to spinal injuries. I sat and drew during several presentations and as the conference went on, I found myself coming to another visual conclusion about the inner body, one more to do with dendritic shaped fibrous growth at the scale of microscopic neurons. I think this was because I had been reading Craig's book and he looks at the evolutionary history of our nervous systems. He welds together ideas about both physical and mental feelings being transmitted to the brain; in such a way that I have an image in my mind of an emotive feeling being no different to a feeling of coldness, when it comes to an electrical signal, carried by neurons and stimulating the brain to make a decision about an action. I also began drawing mice and monkeys, perhaps to make sure I did not forget how grateful we should be to their contributions to spinal injury research. When I draw a monkey, it is a substitution for myself, an image that reminds me I am an animal also. I do realise that without the research that is done we would not be able to further our knowledge but I hope that when animals are used great care is taken to treat them with respect and to minimalise their discomfort and pain.
Notebook page
In their book, 'Your Brain on Art', Magsamen and Ross use the term 'neuroarts', which is defined as 'the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behaviour.' When highlighting art's effect on pain awareness and how it can shape it, they state in relation to people interacting with an art form, (2025, p. 37), 'The physical pain may still exist, but how they emotionally relate to that pain has changed'. It is the visualisation of both a change in emotional relationship and an awareness that the physical nature of our insides is intertwined with these emotional changes, that I hope to continue to develop my art practice out of. It takes me into the unknown, which is where as an artist I need to be, but not only that it gives me an audience that perhaps for the first time begin to see that shapes and forms might actually carry information and communicate it in ways that they had never previously noticed.
However I'm also still probing around at that old problem, of how in making an image do you represent a feeling of being alive? In German there is a term 'zitterbewegung', a sense of vibrating, oscillating energies, that is often associated with quantum mechanics, a term I quite like as it deals with things we cant see, but which need to happen if the things we can see are to behave in ways that result in the world appearing to be as it does. The hidden processes that go on inside our bodies are for myself similar, if they go wrong, the outward appearance of the external body is also changed, another tied together set of happenings.
The making of an animation based on a feeling of the body as a landscape, is one approach I am taking to the visualisation of inner and outer somatic interrelationships, hoping that after watching it, someone might be able to put their own inner body feelings into action and thus begin their own journey to externalise feelings. As well as exploring how some existing interoceptual visualisations of inner body forms could be animated, I've been looking at Faraday wave phenomena, another aspect of vibrational energy depiction, that I've intuitively linked to a personal understanding of the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc.
Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc: Iconography obtained without light, electricity or photographic apparatus, due to the right hand of Dr. M. Adam
Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and Dr. M. Adam, must have at one point in time conjoined to produce the image above. Their activities were I'm sure serious and purposeful and I would like to think that they felt that they had seen something special related to the invisible nature of our existence. They may even have found a way to visualise dark matter, not that it matters, what does matter for myself is the never ending journey of enquiry that as a species we continue to go on, each generation trying in its own way to find ways to visualise those things that we cant see, but which underpin everything that we do.
The old lungs in action
Recent attempts to make images based on a feeling have been made in response to my own asthma. That harsh rasping feel of lungs struggling is one I know well, but to make an image of it is challenging. This time I have tried to think more about spatial aspects and have looked at stretch, perspective and our sense of vertigo when we are too high up and looking down. I never quite get it right, but each time I try something emerges and as it does it adds to the iconography of inner body speculation.
• The Odic force was a hypothetical energy or life force, proposed in the 19th century by Baron Carl von Reichenbach. Named after the Norse god Odin, it was believed to be a pervasive energy that permeated all living things and could be influenced by other invisible forces such as magnetism, electricity and sunlight.
References
Craig, A. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nat Rev Neurosci 3, 655–666 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894
Craig, A. (2014) How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self London: Princeton University Press
Magsamen, S. and Ross, I. (2025) Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us Edinburgh: Canongate
* In his book 'The Human Soul' Baraduc describes something he calls the 'fluidic invisible' or 'Odic liquid'. We in effect swim in an invisible sea named by Baraduc, 'Somod'. The link above is hopefully still live and you will find images of his exposed photographic plates at the end of the book.
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