Why draw ears?

New York Graffiti ear

Take a good look at this graffiti ear, it's a really good one. Very economical with the line, just two curves, one inside the other and a little thickening to suggest the shadow of the deeper inner ear. Ears are a fascinating part of the body, but we rarely focus on them when drawing the head and tend to use eyes, mouth and nose formats. However sometimes it's useful to change focus and look at a different aspect of the head. 

Mozart: Drawing of his own ear in comparison with a normal ear

Mozart was as a musician fascinated by ears and his own in particular was slightly abnormal. This issue of what is normal and what is not, is itself fascinating. For an alien looking at creatures such as haplorrhine or ‘dry nosed’ primates, Mozart’s ears would be regarded as simply belonging to an animal of the ape like strand of mammal evolution and could perhaps have helped the alien sort out a classification difference between tarsiers, monkeys and apes.

The ear of a chimpanzee

Ears are often to be found on a class of early Egyptian reliefs called "ear-stelae." These stelae typically featured images of a god and a supplicant and to the side would be carved or painted several human looking ears. These ears were to aid the gods in hearing the prayers. So they were in effect something like celestial hearing aids. 

Obsidian left ear from a statue of Amenhotep III

The sculptor who carved the left ear of Amenhotep III, would have had to have a very clear idea of how the various elements of an ear fitted together, not unlike the understanding of topological flow lines that a present day Maya software user needs to have.

An ear constructed in Maya

“Ca ‘de l’Oreggia”

Designed by Adolfo Wildt, Lucio Fontana and Luigi Brogginiin in 1930, the sculpture above of an ear was used as an intercom, allowing visitors to announce their arrival. Once separated from its body the ear can operate in often unexpected ways. “Ca ‘de l’Oreggia” or “House of the Ear” in Milan, no longer has a working intercom system set in behind it, however it is now where people come to whisper their secrets, something that I suspect all cities need. I am therefore adapting one of my earlier large ear designs to become exactly that, a listening ear for those that don't have one. 

The Vacanti mouse was one of those viral images that came to inhabit my thinking back in the late 1990s.It was a mouse that looked as if it had had a human ear transplant, but which was actually a cartilage implant  

The Vacanti mouse

However, 20 years on, a university in Tokyo has announced that it has now grown a human ear on a rat, using stem cell technology.

I find an uncanny overlap between images that emerged from my own head as art and those that are emerging from the field of science as medical research.

Stelarc: Ear on Arm

Stelarc has of course 'grown' an ear on his arm. A model ear was implanted beneath the skin, so that the appearance of an extra ear is constructed, not unlike the Vacanti mouse.

Stelarc being operated upon

I would have been more interested if Stelarc had had non human animal ears embedded in his arm. It might have helped with that human animal divide. In many ways children already make the link, they have a fascination with animal/human hybrids and are still happy to become mixed up creatures, think of the number of different animal hats we can buy for our youngsters.

Is this such a long way from the old obsession with human / animal physiognomy?

We used to regard our various 'descents'  into animalistic behaviour as being 'failures', human beings slipping back into animal habits. Our beast like behaviour emerging when we are at our worst. However, this presupposes that we are superior to animals, and in earlier societies animal / human hybrids were regarded as essential bridges between us and the rest of the world. Our human capacity for self reflection, unfortunately also creating a perceived schism between ourselves and the rest of nature. This is not a real schism of course because we are part of nature and cannot remove ourselves from a set of issues that we are an integral part of, but our use of language can make for a way of thinking that appears as if it is not like the way other aspects of reality work. This 'consciousness' is both our special thing and what for many of us is our downfall. By being too self aware we fail to live in the 'now' and worry too much, perhaps we should listen more and talk less. 

Seth and Horus

It could be argued that Gods such as Seth and Horus are ghost memories of earlier shamanistic figures, and most of the folk tales of Europe and other continents will include stories of animal / human hybrids at one time or another, all of which could be trace memories of earlier shamanistic practices.

Dabbabi, the half-man half-bear, a not very bearish bear-human hybrid, as pictured in a 13th century bestiary by Zakariya al-Qazwini

Images of human/bear hybrids that have kept human ears

I seem to have drifted off subject again, but there is a method in my drift, ears are somehow more acceptable than noses or mouths when it comes to replacing them with animal ones, animal ears may even become 'cute', and 'sexy' as in Japanese anime figures.

The cute ear type

I find ears very sculptural and have made lots of drawings of them. They also represent an opening in the body, one that is focused on communication with others. However because we don't normally look closely at ears in isolation they can be very strange. So strange that I have drawn them in the past as undersea life forms, (they are often described as shell-like) and as plants or have embedded ceramic versions of them into walls or gardens. 

Ear installed in a wall in York

Ciprianii’s ‘Rudiments of Drawing

In drawing manuals ears were singled out for individual treatment and in doing so they become like living individual creatures, as if escaped from their role as the brain's listening tool.  

Some drawings of ears are used in reflexology and acupuncture, both “reflex” therapies in that they work with points on one part of the body that affect other parts of the body. As an ‘opening’ into the body the ear is particularly important in these types of therapies and what drawing can do is create map like images that create clear boundaries that are not seen by eye when we look at an ear, but which are deemed to be there by the acupuncture specialists. Again we encounter drawings that impose grid like structures over things that have no boundaries, and like on the sea, we impose a system of reference points that allow us to make actions more understandable to ourselves, in both the cases of the ear and areas of sea, we are able to navigate or find our way through very hard to read territories by using gridded maps. But we also need to remember whoever makes the maps also gets to own the territory. 

I'm also interested in ears because they are often an un-noticed feature and yet they are powerful symbols of our interconnectedness with the rest of the world.

Left over huge concrete 'ear' from WW2

When we were listening for the arrival of bomber planes during the war several giant concrete ears were built on the south coast, their forms like our own ears concave, and suggestive of much larger forms hidden below the ground on which they sit. 

I'm at that age when I'm beginning to lose my hearing. So I have been trying to visualise what it feels like, together with the fact that as I get older, my ears are getting larger, a fact that I can't disassociate from my failing hearing. Are they getting bigger so that they can work more like ear trumpets? My artist's logic is not very scientific, but it helps me when I'm trying to conjure up images about what something feels like. 

The ear when uncoupled from the head becomes something strange, but perhaps all objects become strange when you isolate them from their context. The constant slippage of meaning is in fact normal as we constantly renegotiate what things do for us. At one moment ears are for hearing, but then they become supports for eyeglasses or they are essential to our balance or they are things on which we hang jewellery. However as soon as they are separated from the totality from which they belong, something is not right. Better though that they remain 'strange', for if we ever take them for granted, we might begin to forget just how special they are. 

Anant Tavkar: An ear created using his fingernails working into the back of handmade paper

I did design what I called 'ear bricks' at one point. The idea was that they could be included in any wall that was built next to a quiet area. Then, hopefully when spotted, people would use that space to speak out or whisper the words they had trapped inside themselves; these spaces would listen but never judge or speak back, always accepting whatever was said, and in total confidentiality. 

A proposal for a listening wall

See also:

Drawing hands

Bringing the inanimate to life: Sooty and the animist tradition.