The Canadian paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger's recent writings directed my attention to some etched deer teeth. The teeth form a necklace which was found in the grave of a young woman who died some 16,000 years ago in Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière, in south-west France. Many of the teeth had basic designs carved into them. This necklace now resides in the Canadian National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, and you instinctively know that these signs carved on these teeth must have conveyed something important to the person wearing the necklace.
Deer teeth necklace
The necklace reminded me that as humans we continue to wear bracelets and necklaces and that having symbolic items so close to us, touching our skin, was a very special thing and as a means of communication was as close to 'ingesting' an idea as we could get. Only if we began swallowing these things would we be able to get closer in touch with them. This wanting to be 'in touch' or interconnected with the object of meaning has made me realise that the drawings I have been making of 'somatic' images; drawings of pains, feelings and itches that emanate from inside my body, perhaps need to be made more physical and more 'own-able' or touchable. Could it be that I need to be designing jewellery? The more I look back into prehistory, the more I see possible future uses for my ideas in a time of secularism.
The charm bracelet
If we look at a typical charm bracelet it brings together in one place a range of objects that are all 'out of their size'. I.e. whatever their original nature they are now all reduced to the same size. In this instance there is an image of the Eiffel Tower, a house, a letter and what looks like a kidney bean, all brought together into the same world. We also have a heart symbol, a motorcycle, a human being, a guitar and a fish, a situation not that unlike the one where the poet Lautréamont describes a young boy as being "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella". Andre Breton often used this line as an example of Surrealist dislocation but it could also be used to describe the beauty of a charm bracelet.
I'm very interested in this idea of a common everyday item of jewellery containing within it mysterious and enigmatic objects that have been dislocated from where they came from and which are now intimately worn around someone's wrist or ankle. It could be the prefect solution in terms of a vehicle for my somatic images of visualised inner body sensations. From pains, to feelings of joy or sorrow, or everyday sensations such as itching, or a need to go to the toilet, sleepiness or arousal, these are all very personal experiences. Therefore these tiny relief sculptures might fit into an environment where people are already happy to combine images of kidney beans with fish and motorcycles. In this situation, each object has at some point in someone's life been of meaning to them. It could be argued that in some ways a charm bracelet can be a sort of physical autobiography. Therefore objects designed in response to their inner sensations ought to be at home in that sort of company.
Designs for metal charms based on drawings of inner body sensations
I'm aware that I like to feel the coins in my pocket, I can sort them into sizes and imagine their look from the way they feel. Touching and looking are very intimately connected, so perhaps making things to slip into the pocket is what I should be doing? We shall see, the computer visualisations above are yet another aspect of the idea, they are designed to 'fool' the eye into thinking they look a little like metal. Am I actually just fooling myself, being puzzled is perhaps where everyone ends up when thinking about perception.
I'm using the diagram below as a visual guide to my thinking about how interoception can become exteroception at the moment. Perhaps in relation the wider issue of 'why use drawing', it's an example of changing mode. In this case using drawing's ability to clarify an idea by diagram, rather than using its ability to communicate feeling tone by expressive mark quality, surface appearance by observational drawing or metaphorical association by image construction. But if you begin to push a diagram formally, very quickly the other drawing methodologies begin to come back into play.
Diagram of interoception linked to exteroception via a topological space based on a Möbius strip intersecting a Klein Bottle
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