Mid-Edo Japan: Anatomical flap book
The curator Frances Woodley awhile ago sent me an e mail asking me if I would be interested in participating in a new artist's book project. (Which I did do and I shall put up a post about that soon). She had also, after having a look at some of my recent blog posts, suggested I take a look at Edo anatomical flap books. I love how chance associations build ideas and I opened her e mail just as I had come up from my studio, where I had been cutting up and rebuilding my recent self portrait images; images that are designed to include both exterior views of my face and interior reflections on the somatic state of my emotional life. I had been making inserts and had decided to stitch into some areas ceramic pieces designed to operate as both body organs and memories of past illnesses, in particular a memory of a time when I was plagued by boils.
Ceramic inserts set into a drawing
I decided that these inserts didn't work but something was jelling, an idea was trying to emerge and one cutout element from the drawing I was making I thought had potential, even though eventually I glued it back down into the surface.
Detail of bottom right of interoceptual self-portrait
I was at the back of my mind thinking about those body models that are made for children, but in some sort of fusion with Chinese anatomical flap books.
As you can see from the images below, an Edo anatomical flap book sits in a space between imagination and scientific awareness. You can see intimations of forms that we would expect to see in a modern anatomical model, such as the one above and although they are related and belong to the same family of forms, the Edo book is suggestive of otherworldly forms, ones emerging from the subconscious, rather than them being the product of rational investigation.
Flaps being turned over
I have made many images of invented inner body forms and some of the forms I invented were reliant on memories of images I had already seen, often of other cultures such as books on Tibetan medicine. Some of my attempts to depict an overall internal embodied feeling, such as in the image directly below, were partly derived from the formal language that Japanese artists such as Hokusai invented. Instead of sweeping linear brush strokes, I was relying on the convoluted edges of washes to get a similar energised interior, something I had learnt from looking at Rodin's watercolours.
Image of how I felt, made straight after a hernia operation.
However after looking more closely at Chinese medical diagrams such as this one below, I found myself making a series of images that were partly memories of the images I had looked at and partly my own feelings about how I could depict an inner body; a place that I had never seen, but had interoceptually felt.
I was very taken by the fact that the lungs looked like petals
The 'punctum' for myself was the fact that the lungs in some of the Chinese diagrams looked like petals; in my head I had found an animal/vegetation connection and so was released to then continue the invention.These were some of the images I came up with.
Variations on inner body feelings depicted as types of animal/vegetable hybrids
Although I made several images based on this idea, I felt they were still too close to their Chinese trigger and I doubted that anyone encountering these images would get anything more from them, than from looking at the Chinese originals. The idea needed to be pushed much further.
Eventually I came up with an alternative solution, that during its gestation had used several paper flaps as idea try outs, (see detail above) which although eventually were glued flat back down into the drawing's surface, highlighted for myself the fact that it was perhaps the folding of flaps, in order to reveal 'what lies beneath', that was the most important lesson to be learnt from the earlier Chinese work.
Interoceptual self portrait
The use of flaps within anatomical text books is also something that is part of a Western tradition and at one time I did have a few old text books with enfolded illustrations that I had found in various second hand book shops. These were lost many years ago, but my interest has continued. In particular there can be a lot of paper/card engineering involved and that is something really interesting and might involve research into pop up books as a whole.
Joseph Gibbons Richardson: Medicology or Home encyclopedia of health:
a complete family guide: 1904
Frederick Hollick: The origin of life and process of reproduction:1902
As I start cutting things out again, this is the first image to emerge.
Body with cut out sections laid over it
References:
Birkwood, K, (2020) Cut and paste: assembling multi-layered anatomical diagrams 31 January Royal College of Physicians website: Available at: https://history.rcp.ac.uk/blogs
Brown, M. (2013) Flip, Flap, and Crack: The Conservation and Exhibition of 400+ Years of Flap Anatomies The Book and Paper Group Annual 32 (2013) 6 Available at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cool.culturalheritage.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v32/bpga32-02.pdf
An Edo- Period Flap Anatomy Manuscript From:Thinking 3D A University of St Andrews/Oxford University research project Available at: https://www.thinking3d.ac.uk/JapaneseManuscript/
Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota.
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