Home is a belief

I'm very interested in the idea of belief. So much of my work with interoception relies on belief. Votives can only work if someone believes in them, and so do charm bracelets. When people begin to talk to animals and plants, they implicitly believe that some sort of communication is being made and belief lies at the core of an ability to think like an animist. 

So where do we encounter these beliefs in an everyday situation? How many of us rub a particular object 'for luck', or have special plates or knives and forks that we always choose just because they feel right? We wear odd socks to interviews because we believe that this brings us some sort of hidden advantage, or at least did do once. Objects remind us of special occasions or stories. They operate as doorways into the past, or even as some type of ancestor worship. 

'Shrine' object made for a collaborative project

If homes were temples, they might evolve various alters, special holy of holy sites or shrines. As homes evolve, family members will organise spaces to reflect some sort of belief systems; children in particular will build 'shrines' with actants within them consisting of various soft toys or creatures that they have built up a deep, almost spiritual relationship with, but the adults will also organise spaces where they put family mementoes or examples of past sporting triumphs or memories of holidays taken. 

When we were all confined to our homes because of the covid emergency and associated lockdown, there were articles written to help us come to terms with the home as a sanctuary. (E.g. https://www.hildacarroll.com/treating-your-home-as-a-temple/) It was suggested that people 'think of their homes more along the lines of temples'; they were asked to think about setting a home up as "your (and your family’s) personal sanctuary for your mind, body and spirit." I found this approach fascinating, people were even told that they could, "smudge their space by burning incense or herbs."  The opening of windows it was suggested allowed fresh air (energy or chi) to circulate through a home and that plants would bring vital living energy into a home's spaces. People were also asked to review the art and other knick-knacks around their home. In particular they were asked "do they symbolically support the journey you wish to take going forwards?" How important the home surroundings were was summed up by the need for being "uplifted by the space." In these popular articles it was intuitively understood that a house and its contents were psychically active and that these things affected the people that engaged with them deeply. 

I am also aware that many people of different faiths have home shrines and that these might be built alongside structures arising from more quotidian activities such as the clustering and building of collections of ceramic animals. Some of these activities can seem very like 'animist' belief systems, but they can happily exist alongside more formal religious systems. My initial attention has been focused on those people like myself, that profess no formal religion, but who still seek to achieve some sort of spiritual or psychic relationship with the world we inhabit. In both cases, formal religious activity or an identifiable spiritual need, a material focus can be used to help us meditate or contemplate on things beyond the everyday. 

A vessel for contemplation: Terracotta bowl, filled with water up to the level of inbuilt boat

The vessel above was made to help with my personal contemplation of world events; in this case I made a terracotta bowl, with an attached boat centrepiece. When I poured water into the bowl from a jug, sometimes I could judge the level correctly and water would sit at exactly the level of the side of the boat, but if I judged the amount wrongly, then it would in effect 'sink' the boat. I had to pour the water very carefully if I was not to 'soak' the tiny terracotta figures that crowded together in the centre of the boat shape. This handmade vessel in effect operated as the focal point of a personal 'shrine'. 

I recently delivered a talk to the 5th 'Drawing Conversations' conference about 'Home' as a belief, whereby several strands associated with this aspect of thinking were drawn together. 

In the presentation, two sets of images were compared, both of which emerged from conversations. One set of drawings had been made almost 10 years ago after talking with a refugee living in a repurposed high-rise block of flats and another set of images were recent ones made in response to conversations made in relation to how someone felt about a ‘special’ object they had set out in an important place within their domestic environment. I have been talking to people about their collections of special objects, or the placing of significant things within their homes, to get an idea of how intuitions sometimes need to use material objects as ways to focus or make real, unidentified feelings. These objects were chosen because they meant something spiritually important to the people that lived with them. In both cases drawing was used to reveal narratives that had emerged from human/object relationships and as these narratives unfolded, two different world views were articulated, and revealed as being as much to do with fiction as reality. If felt at times as if the people spoken to had travelled in opposite directions as imaginary travellers, but both had also in different ways had to face a harsh reality.   A third ‘life story’, this one happening in real time, was then interjected, both as an example of how the threads of stories about ‘home’ could be drawn together and of how life events are inseparable from political realities. 

The first story opened out an idea that visualised a tower block as a fictional home. A story told to myself as the image of an actual tower block was drawn in a small sketchbook. This story became the starting point for a series of drawings that attempted to visualise a refugee's dawning awareness of how unwanted immigrants are. The images were also an attempt to show how utopian ideas, such as the Modernist architecture of the tower block, could become inverted, and things that once symbolised hope, now seemed to symbolise despair.

Home

The Mythic Tower

Cut adrift and pushed out

Tipped back into the sea

The invisible ceiling 

The sea

Arrival

The Last of England

As migrants arrive after surviving the harsh realities of various sea crossings, they are mentally tipped back into the seas they crossed by the very people that they thought would welcome them. 

In the intervening years I have returned to this and similar stories several times. Hopefully with more care.

Tales of protection and prayer and the loss of lives.

More recently, a story is told of a long gone trip to Thailand, of a wooden baby that came back from that trip and how the baby lives on in the imagination of a post stroke victim, who remembers better days and a magical time spent in the jungle. 

Tales of a wooden baby and flying fish

A tale of a man who found a wooden baby and flying fish

During the night the jungle changes the baby

The baby in the jungle became a metaphor for something emerging from the subconscious

The baby and Buddha

The baby grown old

I was told a story whilst I made drawings, by a man who when young had experienced the 'hippy trail' in South East Asia, a story focused on memories that were triggered by a wooden carving of a baby Buddha that sat on a coffee table in the middle of his living room. I was also during this time, on evenings, reading another story, one that was focused on an exotic jungle, Chris Beckett's 'Beneath the World, a Sea'. In my mind the stories became fused, Beckett's vision seemed to me, to be of the unconscious mind becoming a landscape reality, as if the strange jungle described in the book, with its pools of other worldly waters, was a physically manifest unconscious, that was tapping into and revealing the subconscious desires of any character that entered it. Perhaps I thought, the remembered jungles of Thailand were like this too. The prints that then emerged from the drawings, became more and more hallucinatory; the passage of an ever growing old baby through imaginary jungles, becoming a journey into the subconscious. 

But suddenly, because of events happening, there was other story to respond to, one that was far more urgent, that needed immediate actions to be taken, in order to resolve the issues arising. 

A neighbour from the Gambia has been picked up by the police and sent to Yarl's Wood detention centre and has been told he will be deported to Rwanda. Our community is a small but tightly knit one in times of trouble and we begin the process of contacting local councillors and MPs, finding specialist immigration solicitors and trying to reassure our now locked away neighbour and tell him that help is on its way. He has already witnessed an attempted suicide. A situation made even worse, because he was then beaten up by the man he tried to save from hanging. Life in the detention centre, or so it seemed to the man our neighbour saved, was worse than death. 

This is no home; this is a Hellhole

Eventually after a concerted effort of several people in the local community, our neighbour is released from Yarl's Wood on bail and he has returned to live in our street. He has horror stories to tell of a system that is in total disarray, one that is used by government to reassure the population that the administration is tough on immigration. Sound bites such as 'stop the boats', covering a reality that is about human misery and suffering on a scale that we have yet to get an idea of. I was happy to join in with my other neighbours, writing letters and badgering important people in order to effect his release, but a series of threats to his wellbeing still remain. In particular, there is a perception of gender in many African countries, that still operates in a similar way to how it was in England before homosexuality was legalised. The difference is that punishment in relation to any perceived deviation from the norm, is often far more draconian. These serious issues mean that any further attempts to return our neighbour to Africa, will need to be resisted forcibly.  

Another group of drawings begins to emerge; I am still making images of what I'm told and these often become surreal depictions of life experiences, however I do realise making a drawing isn't going to release someone from custody, but what it might do is raise someone's awareness of a situation, or these drawings might begin another story, a story that makes people aware of the continuing struggle that many people face, in order to be just who they are. 

See also:

More on water

An exhibition of the Tower Block work

Diagramming Dante

Paradise Lost

The baby in the jungle

Process or substance ontology?

A lump of clay suggested this

I have been over time trying to write about my activities as an artist who draws and makes things under two essential headings, both of which at one time or another have been regarded as a particular nature of being, and it has always been difficult for me to reconcile the two approaches. One has been substance ontology, in which objects are the focus of philosophical interest and the materials of making become central to an understanding of possible metaphors. As a maker, I am very aware of the primacy of materials and how their physical nature shapes and affects possibilities, so I'm particularly attracted to this approach.

Cardboard, tape, a discarded child's bedroom table and a ceramic thought suggested this

The other is as a process ontology, which sees change as more fundamentally real than objects. This way of thinking seems to concur with an awareness of time and the nature of energy fields. At a deep level all is rhythm and a dance of particles and intellectually this is if I think about it probably true. So I am drawn towards any philosophy that argues this case; such as Alfred North Whitehead's as explicated in 'Process and Reality'. He believed that fundamentally, nothing exists in itself, everything is in transformation all the time. Therefore, all that really exists is the relationship between "things", such as mass and energy. This relationship can be either potential or actual. These ideas were based on his particular understanding of quantum theory, which for Whitehead was mathematical. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive view of reality that provided a systematic descriptive theory of the world which could be used for 'the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific'. A stance which of course led to his work being regarded as of great interest by artists such as myself. Intuition and aesthetics in particular holding a very important place in my own attempts to get to grip with what it is to think through the role of art as a means to come to terms with the world. Whitehead helped me to reconcile my own diverse approaches to visualising life experiences or at least to accept that I didn't have to always be clear or sorted out in my head about these things and that if I was confused, I could live with the confusion.  

Everything is in flux, but our problems seem to remain the same

Back in 1929 Whitehead stated; 'We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organic realism, as a basic idea of physical science'.

Whitehead: Process and Reality, 1929, p. 471

Seen that way, the important elements that make up a drawing are not the material things that it is composed of but rather the processes that come together in its becoming and these things are always shifting. However the material reality of the process is fundamental to how that process will operate. 

The peristaltic wave 

Trying to claim either one aspect or another as being fundamental to the make up of a drawing is perhaps a not very useful activity. My attempts to visualise inner body experiences have tended to be done by fixing certain visualised moments within a wider awareness of ongoing processes. Whitehead would though I think if he looked at this work, suggest that I have a problem with constant flux or change. 

The body as a moving inside/outside mass of energy

Perhaps all I'm looking for is a way of visualising moments of stability within the chaos of being and that death is just the dissolving away of one particular process that was stable for a time.

However the ultimate abstract principle of existence for Whitehead is creativity. Existence itself is for Whitehead a process of becoming, and “'becoming' is a creative act. This helps and reinforces my belief that every drawing or made image is also a metaphor for life itself. 

We experience this 'becoming', according to Whitehead as 'occasions' and these he states come in four types or grades. 

The first is a fundamental underlying force, like those interacting with a Higgs field, such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The second are occasions of experience that involve inanimate matter, something that I personally read as an opening for an animist reading of Whitehead's ideas. The third being an involvement with living organisms, a hierarchy which reminded me of Raymond Lull's ascending ladders and  the fourth, which was about the experience of presentational immediacy, which means, I think, the qualia of subjective experience. This 'presentational immediacy' Whitehead suggests, occurs  only in more evolved animals, again something I'm not sure about, but I know what he means. However I can only accept this if these things are enfolded into a totality of being, a totality that acknowledges that the qualia of experience are dependent on an interaction with the Higgs force and all living matter is composed of inanimate matter, which is itself composed of fundamental forces.

The mental and the material aspects of experience or becoming can therefore for us humans be seen as verbal or visual abstractions from experience, (interpretations via various languages). The brain is part of the body, and both are abstractions of a kind referred to by Whitehead as 'persistent physical objects', or in my mind 'nouns'; neither being actual entities. All of which points to a type of understanding that again sits within a flux of becoming; a flux which means that at one moment I seem to be able to nail down a thought, but the next sees everything dissolve into the flow of being. But things are still things and as such they seem to have their own reality.

Three responses to material possibilities offered to me by collaboration

These three responses to what others had done, were all made as part of a 'vitrine' project, 'Regenerative Things' and were done in relation to a 'Thing Power' research group. I'm no longer part of this project, but it did help me to come to terms with an acceptance of change and the letting go of ownership, as whatever was done, was quickly pulled apart and dismantled by someone else, but at the same time something of the idea, or material potential would remain, as the work was reinterpreted by whoever followed me and what I was therefore providing was 'potential'; and it is perhaps this idea of 'potential' that is the most intriguing for me. 

Every art work ever made is like a battery that is charged with 'potential'. As someone looks at and considers a drawing, a painting or an object, that potential is released as a thought transfer. The materiality of the work, gives weight and externality to someone's thinking, so that it can be offered forward to another person as a materialised thing. Those that encounter the 'made thing' can then interpret it in whatever way they need to. This potential is for myself so exciting. In my mind, it sits alongside the body's interoceptive ability to predict. The main thing I have taken from my work on visualising interoception is that the body is a focus for the construction of prediction loops, whereby emotions and physical responses to stimuli are entwined together in order to respond to things before they happen. The body hosts a mass of interconnected triggers that make it do stuff in response to best guess scenarios and this system of making best predictions, is central to how we think. By inventing a new thing that is open to interpretation, others are challenged as to how to read a possibility. Some will not see any need to spend energy on this but others will and the fact that something new has been made that adds to another body's awareness of potential is a wonderful idea. 

References:

Barrett, L. F. (2017) How Emotions are Made London: Pan

Pert, C. B. (1999) Molecules of Emotion London: Simon and Schuster

See also:

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

How analogue and digital thinking can support the visualisation of interoception 

Visualising energy flow

Why interoception

Drawing on experience

Crosshatching as energy carrier

William Blake after Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul, c1789-90

When looking closely at some of the images in the 'William Blake's Universe' exhibition at the Cambridge University Fitzwilliam Museum, I was entranced by the various uses of cross hatching. In particular Blake's rendering of the image chosen for the exhibition poster, had me gazing closely at its surface and as I did my gaze became lost in the movement of one surface into the next, as the cross hatching overlapped and its curved lines not only made form but produced energy at the same time. 

Hendrick Goltzius 

Some time ago I put up a post on cross contour drawing but when I did I failed to open out how powerfully some artists had used cross hatching to energise surfaces and create energy fields. Some artists in particular, such as Hendrick Goltzius, who was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, specialised in using these techniques. Rembrandt for instance encouraged his students to copy Goltzius engravings as a way to learn how to cross-hatch. Notice how the engraved lines both follow the form and give an indication of tone. However it is in pen and ink and chalk drawings that we see the technique used at its most subtlest.  

Head of Mercury: Hendrick Goltzius 

Goltzius had developed his engraving technique by exerting a change in pressure as he pushed the graver through the metal. This meant that as it cut through he could 'swell' the line in order to make it give a better impression of a rounded three dimensional form. He then began to emulate his engravings in pen and ink, the 'Head of Mercury' being an amazing example of expression and control, welded together If you look at the drawing closely, the flow of energy made by surfaces as they follow masses moving, in and out of shadow is quite exhilarating. 

Rubens

Rubens: Detail

If you look at the Rubens drawing above, you can see how the pen strokes create compacted energy, their slight curvature suggesting the soft curves of the body, the depicting of the movement of light to dark necessitates points of overlap, suggesting a constant flow of one field of energy into another. 

Durer uses this technique to both suggest mass and texture. The hair texture dances to one set of rhythmic dynamics, whilst the planes of the head are suggested by another set of rhythmically set out lines. What appears at a distance to be a solidly modelled head, on closer inspection becomes a series of energy fields. 

Durer

Durer: Detail of energy movements

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's drawing, 'The Ungrateful Son', is a very good example of how planar reinforcement using hatched lines, is not just a powerful explainer of how masses work within a complex solid such as a head, but can also be a way to demonstrate how energy fields can interact and overlap.  

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Ungrateful Son, ca. 1777

Greuze, The Ungrateful Son: detail

Greuze has a very strong grasp of three dimensional form, each line reinforcing the head's planar structure, but we can also see that complex rhythms are made as these contour hugging lines overlap. The movement of marks as they define the brow, the eye socket, the cheek and the nose, chin and mouth, is not unlike currents or eddies in a stream flowing over rocks. These marks also link one facial form to another; if you begin by looking at the bridge of the nose, you can drop down its side and slide over the cheek, falling towards the mouth and then visually tumble down towards the chin and neck. An idea of the body as landscape emerges the closer you get to the drawing. 

The body's energy field

I have begun to think about how these various energy fields overlap. Perhaps this was triggered in my head by listening to obituaries of Professor Higgs who died last week and the various accounts of the Higgs field. This is a field of energy that is accompanied by the Higgs boson, used by the field to interact with other particles, such as electrons. This interaction gives weight to the particles and hence 'mass' comes into being as well as energy. 

Mapping the energy of a concrete block in the sea wall

Gradually my thoughts about the energy of seeing are becoming fused with the energy inside mass and how it sits within the space that surrounds it. 

Perceptual study of a toy dinosaur found in the woods

I am still working on how to visualise the inner body, so will be trying to add in these thoughts about energy mass, as I try to fuse the ageing awareness of a body into the landscapes that it remembers. But for now this is where that particular strand of thinking has settled. 

The ageing body and a memory

Aways so much to do, always so many things to reconcile, but as always so many exciting things to get involved with.  

See also:

Cross contour drawing

Visualising Energy Flow

Visualising energy flow part two

Signs of life in flowing line drawings

Quantum entanglement

Drawing the internal body

Max Brodel: The mouth

Max Brodel: The throat

There still seems to be a worry about the relationship between fine art drawing and illustration. I personally find no real difference between them, both are concerned with trying to represent and communicate visually things that we experience. The fine artist often makes very personal decisions as to what is being visualised and the illustrator is usually more directed by the role they have in solving problems set by others, but whether the problem set is a personal one or set by others, at the end of the day a piece of visual communication is made, that is either one that works well or doesn't. The history of art includes many artists working directly for clients, be these to do with the church, the ruling elites or galleries and many artists have also worked as illustrators or have had roles that didn't separate out the 'artist' from the other functions that someone was involved with. For instance a monk may have also been a fantastic image maker, but their main role as someone in the service of whatever religious order they belonged to, meant that they were never singled out as 'signature' artists; in fact most artists would as far as history is concerned, be anonymous. We can ask questions of an artwork, such as does the work enrich our understanding or awareness, does it help us to get more in touch with our feelings, does experience of it allow us to do things differently? But we can ask these questions of a fine art painting, sculpture or drawing, just as much as we can of an illustration,

I compare my own work with both fine art and illustration. For instance, my interest in interoception overlaps with medical illustration as it attempts to visualise what goes on within the body but I'm also trying to communicate feeling tone, something more akin to music perhaps and therefore closer to artists dealing with expressionist themes, so I'm also happy to look at artists such as Max Beckman or Cecily Brown, both of whom have contributed to the visualisation of the human body's expressive possibilities.

There is a history of medical illustration that is vitally important to how we think about the interior of our bodies. One artist in particular was very influential on the development of the contemporary anatomy textbook and his work is also of interest to myself in that he developed very specific techniques in order to communicate the particular qualities of our visceral  insides. Max Brodel (1870-1941), is considered to be one of the shapers of modern medical illustration. He understood that a drawing was much better than a photograph when it came to showing others what was going on and he had this to say about copying:

"Copying a medical object is not medical illustrating. The camera copies as well, and often better, than the eye and hand, in medical drawing full comprehension must precede execution."

In order to better communicate what he was seeing, Brodel devised a method of using carbon dust to create a two tone technique that could capture the sparkling highlights that characterise the wet visceral look of the interior living body. His particular use of carbon dust involved using special paper coated with white layers of chalk or clay. Carbon dust is then layered on the paper in stages to create shadow and depth. The results are incredibly rich tonal images that not only suggest wet insides but capture the nature of three dimensional form well. He also used erasers to lift out bright highlights and create further three dimensional effects. 

Max Brodel: Illustration of the musculature of bladder and urethra

It is interesting to compare his drawings with Alberto Morroco. Alberto Morrocco unlike Max Brodel was an artist better known for his landscapes. 

Alberto Morroco

Morroco produced anatomical drawings in the period following his service as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps during WWII and never made any other anatomical drawings once he had completed his work for the anatomy textbook. However the drawings he did do are powerful examples of how to communicate complex hard to read views of the interior of the human body. 

Alberto Morroco: The eye

Alberto Morroco was making his images in the mid-twentieth century and medical textbooks were now being printed in colour. This meant that he could selectively add colour to his drawings in order to further distinguish or pick out vital aspects of the anatomy he was focusing on. His drawing technique is better at depicting the bony substrata of the body, whilst you feel that Brodel keeps you much more aware of the slimy visceral nature of the body's reality.

Both artists influenced my own ideas about how we might visualise inner body feelings. 

The pain of separation

The image above, 'The pain of separation' being an image produced after working with someone who had experienced heartache and longing for someone. This was in effect a landscape of their emotions and was as much a response to anatomical illustrations as it was to cross sections of landscape whereby the structure of rocks is revealed as a cross section. 

Geologic cross section of the Flagstaff area, northern Arizona

Slicing into the body's skin

The one thing missing of course is annotation. Because feelings are so hard to point to, sadness, regret, longing etc. are all subjective experiences and therefore although two people might come to some sort of agreement as to what something might mean, this is far from a universal language that is useable by everyone. This is perhaps the fine art/illustration divide. An illustration will need to have an agreed communicative value, but the fine art image is open to interpretation. Hopefully though by working with someone and forging an agreed synthesis of visual/verbal responses, something gets communicated that is greater than the conversations that were had and that something more universal emerges from the conversational drawing activity, that is sensed by others when they see the final image, which is in this case a digital print. 

Reference

Cullen, Thomas A. "Max Brödel, 1870-1941, Director of the First Department of Art as Applied to Medicine in the World". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Vol. 33, No. 1, January 1945.

Macdonald. Joanne (2022) How can drawing support understanding in anatomy through the work of Robert Douglas Lockhart (1894-1987)? Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

See also:

Drawing and healing

Joanne Macdonald: Drawing Bodies

What lies beneath