What lies beneath

William Smith Geological map of Great Britain 1815

The more I think about interoception and the world around me, the more I realise that we are shaped by a combination of what lies beneath the surface of our bodies and what lies below the Earth we stand upon. Again it is diagrams that we rely upon to tell us what is there and as I have been having to teach a few sessions on the World Building and Creature Design MA, I have been reminded in particular of how signs of the geological evolution of the Earth and the physiological evolution of our bodies are physically present deep within both.

Perhaps we need to go back to Greek times to see why we can understand things in this way. R. G. Collingwood in his 1945 treatise on the Idea of Nature, had this to say about the Greek view of the natural world; 

    'Since the world of nature is a world not only of ceaseless motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or regular motion, they accordingly said that the world of nature is not only alive but intelligent; not only a vast animal with a 'soul' or life of its own, but a rational animal with a 'mind' of its own.' (Collingwood, 1960. P. 3)

At one point Collingwood describes Greek thinking on this issue as an analogy. He states that before we know the world we know ourselves and when we look at ourselves we see that a complex series of constantly moving physical parts are kept in equilibrium by a mind directing all the various components. Therefore early philosophers argued that nature as a whole must work the same way. It is intelligent and seeks to maintain autonomy and survive by making decisions that are advantageous to its survival. Interestingly back in 1945 Collingwood was using this argument as a contrast to what he was then calling 'modern' or 'scientific' thought. Concepts such as the embodied mind and ecosophy were yet to enter the world of philosophical academia in England, but Collingwood's description of Greek thought would be very familiar to anyone who has read the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia concept proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form synergistic and self-regulating systems that maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. Lovelock and Margulis put the idea together in the 1970s, but any believer in animism from two thousand years ago would have also understood the idea. It was the Judeo-Christian concept of a monotheistic God that removed this embodied metaphor, instead it was God the great creator, the engineer that lay behind everything, who was responsible for why things worked in the way they did. This took away nature's autonomy or as God put it:

'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' Genesis 1:26

Instead of the world being regarded as a giant complex intelligent interconnected physical being, a thing that we had to both commune with and fit in with if we were to survive, we were given the idea that we were in some way better than nature and that we could 'have dominion' over it. 

However the ancient idea that the world of nature is not only alive but intelligent and that it is a vast animal with a 'soul' or life of its own, still seems to have traction. Sometimes we use the term 'bodyscape' to describe the metaphorical use of body imagery in relation to landscape. Ancient metaphors that understood the earth to be modelled on the human body are sometimes seen as being one-way relationships; the ‘landscape as body', but more recent changes in philosophical thinking, in particular the material turn and object orientated ontology, point to a two way process, 'the body as landscape' being just as significant. 

Pioneering stratigrapher William Smith is credited with creating the first useful geological map, (see image at the start of this post), and it is very interesting to compare drawings of slices through human skin to slices through the Earth's mantle. The fact that we think of rocks as having veins suggests that we see the layers of geological strata as being analogous to the way we think about our own bodies. 

Visualisations of layers of the skin

In the image above numbers are used to annotate the various different layers as we progress down into the human body. For example '1' is the cuticle and '2' its soft layer. '4' represents the network of nerves and '6' three nerves that divide off from that network.  The way the cross section is drawn in many ways brings together various ideas of bodies and landscapes, the need to create distinct textural areas being common to both formats, stippling and broken lines being used by both geologists and anatomists to identify different layers. 

Veins of molten rock penetrate the layers of the Earth's crust

Geological cross sections

Geological plan view of what lies beneath

Nomawethu: Map of her body, with her personal story of illness

Ntombizodwa

The two images directly above are from a body mapping workshop led by South African artist Jane Solomon. To create these Body Maps, participants filled a life-sized outline of their bodies with handprints, footprints, personal symbols and text. Ntombizodwa states; "Look here where I have painted the virus. On 19 January 2001 I became very sick. Stomach pains and headache. It was summer time, the season of peach and apricot, and I thought that’s why I had a sore stomach."

Greek natural science was based on an analogy between nature as a macrocosm and humans as a microcosm. Nature was viewed as an intelligent organism, just as a human being is. In the same way that we realise that we have a mind that directs our body's operations, it was argued that nature must have some sort of intelligence too if it was to direct its various affairs successfully. Just as we devise ways to portray the interior of our bodies, we find ways to portray the interior of the land that we live on. 

A body slice

A slice through a landscape

The more I think about these relationships the more the imagery I use to depict certain states of interoceptive awareness becomes influenced by old maps and diagrams. Feelings are like 'soundings' taken from deep within the body. The body being both its own landscape and an inhabiter of landscapes. 

A feeling of internal change

The image, 'A feeling of internal change' (above) was made whilst I had bad stomach ache and was feeling sick. I had been fine all day, doing a glass workshop in the morning and helping out at a busy art book fair in the afternoon. I then walked home, but on the way began to feel totally exhausted. Knowing I had to go back out that evening, I decided to eat a fast snack, that included a spicy onion bhaji and a glass of milk. Whatever the combination of spices and cooking oils was, it did not agree with me and I was doubtful whether or not I would be able to go out again. The image above was then drawn in my sketchbook while I was waiting for my friend to arrive, and then hopefully by that time I would be feeling better. The milk I had drunk, seemed to be helping combat the acid, but I was still feeling sick. While the image was still fresh in my mind, I photographed it and began to add colour in Photoshop. The blue was an attempt to show the change, with the red an indication that the pain was still sharp, but now intermittent. 

I was literally grasping around for an image that would communicate an invisible something and as I did I realised I was also sensing it in my fingers and the image is an attempt to show this as well. I was drawing a slice through an imaginary body that was also a map, but a map of an unknown territory and one that was changing rapidly, one that was being felt for by my fingers, even though they could not touch it. 

The body and a pain

Interoception includes an awareness of pain, as well as the development of images of pain with which we can at times conquer pain. But it is also about an awareness of feeling tone, of where the body is located in space and other somatic events. Alongside this complexity is a wider awareness of the interrelatedness of everything. There is another aspect of bodily awareness that is a very ancient one, one that has at times been approached under the heading of Tantric Art, and is not just a celebration of the body, but an understanding of the body as being a physical representation of the cosmos itself. Unseen but still sensed experience can I believe be understood as an aspect of the sublime. In the case of interoception, visualisations of these invisible sensations are of a hybrid form that is a composite between visual invention and memories of past experiences, and they rely on physical resemblances with other objects as well as a more abstracted understanding of energy flow. 

In order to explore a relationship between physical resemblance and an understanding of energy flow, we can look at Harold Fisk's meander maps of the Mississippi River.

Harold Fisk: Meander Map of the Mississippi River

When trying to imagine the human body and landscape being fused together, Harold Fisk's mapping processes, which looked at landscapes over long periods of time, are useful to look at. Harold Fisk's maps represent the memory of a river; thousands of years of river course changes are compressed into a single image and because of this the landscapes 'come alive'. Geological time unfolds into a human time-frame, the maps becoming 'more like us' as they do so. We often point to mapping as a very 'objective' activity, forgetting that as inhabitants of very particular bodies, we are bound to make things that reflect our particular physical make-up and awareness of time. In this case a geological feature is converted into a record of changing energy flows, using shapes and colours and a scale of production, that is little different to an anatomy diagram. As I get older I'm more and more aware of signs of ageing, but forget that signs are layered, and instead of just looking at how things appear to be as they are on the skin's surface, I think I might be better off looking for those signs that are obscured, lost beneath the skin, but which also reveal the past as well as indicating a fast approaching future. 

Harold Fisk: Meander map

13th Century English anatomy illustration

I'm not just thinking of my own body's past, but our collective human history and you don't have to go that far back to see the body as a type of landscape. The 13th century illustration above of the body could easily be read in this way, just as Fisk's maps could also be read as anatomical diagrams.

Homme 4D

The image 'Homme 4D' reminded me of a time when I used to collect old anatomy drawings, in particular ones that opened out and revealed the body as a set of layers. These disappeared many years ago, but I did find this image on a flickr site, which is another example of how to display a body seen through time as well as space, in this case folding out a series of layered representations. 

Fisk's work also reminded me of Nikolaus Gansterer's diagrams, in particular Gansterer's idea of the drawing as a 'score'. 

From the Embodied Diagrams series by Nikolaus Gansterer

Nikolaus Gansterer's Embodied Diagrams series derive from a four year research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. This was a collaborative project that developed shared figures of thought, speech, and movement reflecting on the specific nature of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ operative within artistic practices that seek to represent the body. Drawing was used as a translational bodily process that was able to help the research team imagine a variety of forms in which a drawing of the body can become manifest, materialise, and take shape. Gansterer. points out that, 'The German words for drawing (zeichnen) and for notation, recording (aufzeichnen) share the same etymological root'.  Acknowledging this, Gansterer produces 'scores' as imaginative prompts. These 'scores' are used to map the complex 'relation-scape' between body, place and atmosphere, a 'diagrammatic (re-)presentation of embodied knowledge(s).' 

He describes his images as mapping the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening live and the subtle processes in the event of "figuring something out". This situation intrigued me, because in my own work I had been trying to balance a representation of a thing with a process, for instance an awareness of a pain and at the same time of the process of feeling the pain and of communicating it, a quite difficult process because it crossed several boundaries. The British 'stiff upper lip' might for instance, make it hard to measure pain's effect on a subject taught to show no emotion. 

 

Gansterer worked in collaboration with the writer Emma Cocker, dancer Mariella Greil and others and their work is available at: www.choreo-graphic-figures.net I was particularly fascinated by the collaborative aspects of Gansterer's research and as I have already been working in collaboration myself, think it is perhaps time to revisit some of the issues involved. The fact that mapping is usually associated with geological terrain is something I don't think I've made the most of and as I have been trying to visualise the invisible, mapping might offer a way of building in signposts or guides as to where things might be located. 

Visualisation of a breathing restriction

Visualisation of peristaltic waves

Both of my drawings above are images derived directly from my own personal experiences of responding to an awareness coming from inside the body and they are attempts to visualise for others the feelings that I had at the time. Both images were initially drawn by hand and then scanned into PhotoShop and adjusted until the colour felt right. Photoshop also allowed me to use layers and in doing so I could add diagrammatic details such as arrows or colour used to identify where a centre of a pain might lie.  

By visualising something normally invisible to others, perhaps an alternative form of communication could be developed in relation to health matters. In particular in the case of a growing awareness of peristaltic waves, (stomach pains), this might mean that someone should be having conversations about taking exercise or eating more fibre. I think the image of peristaltic waves works well in conveying my own personal feelings, but would anyone besides myself guess that that is what the image is of. I could use an outline drawing of a body to indicate where the sensation lies, but as soon as I do the richness of the imagery is dissolved into a very obvious sign and as that happens the 'feeling tone' is lost and its the 'feeling tone' that I really want to capture. However, by taking 'Homme 4D' as a model, I have tried to develop new images that begin to have more of the visual ambition of Fisk's work and which are the basis for an enfolding or layering of images, colours and textures to suggest somatic experiences. 

The thought form of an inner body sensation

Headache

The visualisation of tinnitus

By now I have hundreds of images developed in collaboration with other people in various attempts to visualise their awareness of normally invisible internal sensations. I shall take a selection of these to Porto in July, and use them to instigate a set of workshops designed to assess how transferrable these ideas are. I will be hosting some workshops with hopefully medical staff and students and we will see whether or not there is a common visual language that could be used between both art and medical practitioners, as well as non specialist audiences. 

The images below were made when thinking about the body anatomically as a geologically accessible object, a poetics of the cross section. 

Innerbody landscapes

References

Collingwood, R. G. (1945, 2022) The Idea of Nature London: Dead Authors Society

Fisk, H.N., (1952) Mississippi River valley geology relation to river regime. Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 117(1), pp.667-682.

Rawson, P.S., (1973, 2012) Tantra: The Indian cult of ecstasy. London Thames and Hudson 

Winchester, S. and Morris, M.D., (2002) The map that changed the world: William Smith and the birth of modern geology. Leadership and Management in Engineering, 2(2), pp.12-13.

See also:

The embodied diagrams of Nikolaus Gansterer

Between art geometry emotion and science

Drawing using analogue and digital processes

Qualia

Visualising energy flow

Why interoception?

Drawing the internal body

Drawing and healing

Pseudo-Galen, Claudius

In the West art and anatomy have a long association; they are entangled together, which I suppose was a necessary condition as the ability to render objectively accurate images of the body necessitated artists study anatomy. Dissection of humans however was largely forbidden in the ancient world, but early medical thinkers such as Galen and Vitruvius were still able to come up with theories for how the body worked by dissecting animals, and from the information gathered, they deducted how the inner mechanics of humans worked, often by linking this knowledge to observations of exterior signs of illness such as changes in body colour and condition. This internal / external interrelationship would dominate Western thinking for centuries and in many ways still does. 

Galen' s Tripartite Scheme, explaining how the blood circulated through the body

I love a good diagram and Galen has diagrammatic ideas as to how the body works. He believed in Hippocrates' Humoral ideas, which pointed to the existence of four fluid humors in the human body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegmatic. Humors were divided into the body and a perfect harmony among them resulted in perfect health. Galen also linked the humoral theory to Aristotle’s ideas, which stated that the basis of existence resided in four elements: water, air, earth and fire. Each vital organ would be linked to one type of humor, which in turn, would be related to a natural element. We can see therefore how the body can also be seen as a landscape composed of the same basic elements as the environment that hosts it. The components of the body reflecting the ingredients of the earth. However it is Vitruvius who provides the classic image that we all remember when it comes to the proportions of the body.

Vitruvius

Theory and observation come together in the Renaissance and interestingly in his drawing 'Vitruvian Man', Leonardo did not represent Vitruvius's proportions, instead he used those he found himself after measuring several male models, a sign that things were changing. Vitruvius wrote his 'Ten Books on Architecture', approximately one thousand five hundred years before Leonardo read them. It is the only text on the subject of architecture to survive antiquity, but of far more interest is that it was also one of the first texts in history to draw the connection between the architecture of a human body and that of a building, not only is the bi-lateral symmetry of the body seen as a model for architecture, the interrelationship of body proportion is also seen as something that should be extended into architectural design. This, coupled with the fact that Vitruvius also states that the architect should also have a knowledge of the study of medicine. A building like the humans it is made for can become sick, because climate or air flow can effect the healthiness and unhealthiness of sites, and as Vitruvius goes on to point out, the use of different waters can also lead to illness if not controlled properly. The Romans were very good at building in underfloor heating, channelling water and creating steam baths. By extension an unhealthy body has characteristics similar to an unhealthy building. These characteristics I would argue are similar to those that compose what Henri Bergson in his book 'Creative Evolution' called the ‘élan vital’, an energy that runs through everything, not just living things. The implication of a force such as élan vital is that all materials have the potential to be informed by or formed into others, they just need to be in interaction with each other in some way. So you could describe something like metamorphosis or hybridity as a product of interactions between different energy states. For instance some of the interrelationships between interoception and perception are at their most interesting at the transition or liminal stage, between an external perceptual awareness of lets say a foot and interoceptual messages coming from a foot pain source, such as a bunion. One type of awareness passes into and becomes another type of awareness. This perceptual edge-land is for myself where visual invention conjoins with visual observation.

Image from an interoception awareness workshop

Like Russian dolls, these energy fields can sit one within the other, each one similar to the others, but each one also unique and having its own features. It is in the transition space that sits between the drawing of a man and the drawing of geometry that an idea grows. 

Leonardo: Vitruvian Man

Even though the Catholic Church prohibited dissection, artists and scientists performed it to better understand the body. Renaissance artists wanted knowledge of the inner workings of the human body, which they believed would give them the necessary skills to paint and sculpt it in such a way that body positions represented appeared realistic or natural. 

Andreas Vesalius: On the fabric of the human body in seven books

In the 16th century the physician Vesalius published his influential work, 'On the fabric of the human body in seven books'. He was an anatomist as well as a doctor and in making observations from his actual dissections was able to establish that many of Galen's theories were wrong. As these 'advances' in medicine were undertaken, what they also seemed to do was develop an idea of the body as a 'mechanism' or purely physical organ, advances in representation going alongside advances in medical procedures. 

However there were other traditions. 

Hua Khar Jaintsa 'Course of the Lifespan Principle' (1995–96) Pigment on cloth

In 1991 the 5,000 year old body of what was to be called Ötzi the Iceman was discovered. Entombed in ice shortly after his death, the glacial conditions protected much of his tissue, bones and organs and in particular because his skin was preserved, his tattoos were too.

Ötzi the Iceman with tattoo locations

80% of the tattoos found on the iceman overlap with classical Chinese acupuncture points, in particular those used to treat rheumatism, a medical condition that contemporary forensic archeology tells us the iceman suffered from. Other tattoos were found to be located on or near acupuncture points as well. Various herbs and medicines were also found alongside his remains, all pointing to ancient medical practices, that suggest the iceman belonged to a society with a surprisingly advanced health care system.

It is instructive to compare the Iceman's medical care with Tibetan medicine, a holistic practice with an approach that focuses on the conjunction of mind, body, and spirit. Also known as Sowa-Rigpa medicine, it is an ancient medical system that employs a complex approach to diagnosis, incorporating techniques such as pulse analysis, urinalysis, behaviour and dietary observation to determine what is wrong and uses herbs and minerals alongside acupuncture to treat illness. Hua Khar Jaintsa (active 1990s), created several intriguing images whereby the principles of Tibetan medicine were explained. The image 'Course of the Lifespan Principle' clearly illustrating the relationship between acupuncture points and the way that energy flows through the body. Hua Khar Jaintsa has created a body of work that reflects on many issues related to human development as well as on medicine and it stands comparison to many western European artists who have also attempted to explain the normally hidden aspects of our bodies.

Hua Khar Jaintsa: Early Human development

Hua Khar Jaintsa: Vulnerable points

It is interesting to compare Hua Khar Jaintsa to both Alberto Morroco and Luboš Plný.  Alberto Morroco was the artist who in 1949 created the images for one of the definitive anatomy textbooks. 

Alberto Morroco

Luboš Plný makes anatomical images of the human body, but he is also concerned to depict its functioning, its limitations, and its mortality. Sometimes labelled “anatomical self-portraits”, he combines coloured inks with acrylic paint and collage with organic elements such as blood, hair, the ashes of his dead parents and used medical aids to depict the body.  He makes precise records of skin, musculature, bones, circulatory systems, and organs, embedding his observations into montages consisting of drawings made on the basis of everything from 19th-century anatomical guides, X-ray images, photographs of Madonnas and any other medical or religious items that he comes across. 

Luboš Plný 

Plný seems to have intuitively understood that as in Buddhist influenced health practices such as those practiced in Tibet, India, Nepal Siberia, China and Mongolia, healing is about confronting and transforming suffering and rebalancing the mind and body to equilibrium and not about waiting until someone is sick, so that you can then cure them. This equilibrium is something the body itself is constantly seeking to achieve, using its hormone systems to effect change when it senses things are out of balance. 

Hormone Map

A brief look at a hormone map gives you an idea of the complexity of the body's feedback mechanisms.  It also gives a chemical insight as to why an unhealthy body can affect mental health, and how poor mental health can affect the state of the body. The energy field that moves between the body and mind is called in Tibetan medicine 'duawa' and this is shaped by a combination of environment, diet, history, behaviour and belief system.  For instance it is believed that if we eat the wrong foods, they can accumulate in our bodies and eventually manifest as illness. In terms of my understanding of what my own art practice is and what it could be, it has been important to understand that historically Tibetan artists created powerful images that were used as practical guides for well-being. 

Tibetan Buddhist paintings of medical issues are used to help people understand the relationship between their condition and treatment, these images can combine physical, mental and spiritual conditions as well as illustrate how treatment could help them. This is a step beyond the work of a medical illustrator, and would seem to me to incorporate medical illustration with religious art, conceptualism and expressionism. 

This fusion of various different disciplines offers for an artist such as myself a lot of freedom, whilst at the same time giving me a sense of purpose, especially as I continue my search for a way to visualise various forms of interoception. Here is another image, this time taken from an illustrated handbook of reflexology. The image of feet also has depicted within it images of the various parts of the body that are interconnected to them by energy flows which are themselves stimulated into action by applying pressure onto particular areas of the soles of your feet.

Acupuncture reflexology 

The conjunction of images suggests a fluid liquidity of an embodied understanding, that compresses head, lungs, stomach and heart into a body that can exist within the flattest flatness of flat feet. 

Holbein: Dead Christ

I am interested in a way of making images that combines Holbein's veracity, with an acupuncture reflexology diagram, with a chemical stain, with architectural space, with an emotive mark making system and a conversation between two people whereby they agree that a feeling tone can be not only depicted, but in that depiction captured and therefore externalised and making it available to healing rituals. As I struggle to find the right approach, I as always look around for artists that I think have developed a practice that feels as if it is hitting a spot at least near to where I would like to be. For instance Palden Weinreb, a New York–based artist draws on Buddhist teachings in his art practice, he makes works that help us to regulate our body rhythms. In the work below a pulsing white light brightens and dims in echo with our breathing patterns, encouraging deeper, more thoughtful, slower breaths. These regulated breaths may well have physical, psychological, and emotional benefits. He is essentially making a mandala within a mandala, a cycling light sits in the centre of a series of nested half spheres, the artwork as it pulses operating as an instrument for meditation. 

Palden Weinreb

Weinreb's work is though but an echo of a very old Tibetan tradition, which includes the making of mandalas that have now been produced by anonymous artists for hundreds of years. These artefacts are though rarely to be seen on their own and would normally be accompanied by prayer or some other ritual. 

Tibetan Mandala

There can be constructed between any two things a hybrid, therefore different aspects of the representation of humanity can be brought together, non figurative or more abstract images can be brought together with representation, sometimes to instruct and at other times to provide images that help foster moments of reflection or meditation. These hybrid forms are I believe necessary ones, because they allow imagery to operate across boundaries and to link together previously separate concepts. 

From a series of images developed initially as foot votives

Colour and light would appear to me to be central to the way we develop metaphor, light in particular has often been used to provide a gateway into spiritual reflection. 

Fused glass: memory of rib pain

Fused glass: Lower leg insect bites

I have looked at drawing with light in the past, and I have more recently been made aware of the healing power of both colour and light. 'Colour halls' were used for healing in ancient Egypt, China and India and I still remember first coming across SAD lights in a restaurant in Glasgow some years ago, and finding out then how much a lack of sunlight in winter effected northern people's circadian rhythms. 

The various energy fields that move between the body and mind can all be thought about and reflected upon within the process of image making. Some of these processes will have historically belonged to the realm of religious imagery, others to more general ideas of spirituality but others have now entered the world of contemporary medical practices. Whether these issues are seen as belonging to art as therapy, or to art as a focus for meditation and a doorway into spiritual enlightenment, or simply as a way to use our hands and making skills as route into good mental health, I do think that we ought to be far more aware of art's potential to become once again part of the essential wellbeing of life. 

See also:

Drawing and urban acupuncture 

Drawing bodies

Flesh

Paper and skin

Science and myth

Drawing with light

Working with stained glass

Drawing and quantum theory