Stress influences the way we perceive pain. Our worry associated with pain, especially if the pain is long lasting, can make it worse. There is a feedback loop that will eventually lead to anxiety and depression and it is this feedback loop that I am hoping to break when I work with people who have experienced severe pain.
Making votives alerted me to the fact that rituals and objects associated with them could be used to take away the pain or distress associated with a difficult experience. A votive materialises a thought, it congeals around a feeling and gives it literal weight. Once objectified, the votive releases the feeling from the person and can pass it on, become a holder for it or become a channel for the intervention of a higher power. The psychology of the situation involves the release of the trauma from the person who is suffering and 'takes their mind off it', as one of the people I was working with put it.
The work with votives always involves a drawing led conversation and that conversation leads to the visualisation of a desire or need. This is very emotional. The study of interoception grew out of this work and it has made me very aware that emotions are built within the body, that they are physiological responses to both interior and exterior change. When trying to visualise somatic awareness, I have begun gradually to build up a language of forms that have emerged from both workshops and one-to-one drawing conversations; conversations that are centred on the correspondent agreeing that it is possible to develop an image of their feelings, in a not too dissimilar way to how a police artist would sit with an observer of a crime and work with them to construct an identikit image of the perpetrator. Is it more like this...or like this...? The good thing about this approach is that the person involved doesn't need to know anything about art, they just need to make basic yes/no decisions.
When researching older areas of esoteric thinking, that have now being debunked by science, such as geometrical psychology, Rayonism and other para-scientific theories, I began to see certain common beliefs, that might not have stood the test of time, but which do reflect an intuitive set of feelings that point to some sort of vibrational understanding of our reality.
The idea of chakras, the concept of body auras or the captured energy fields as seen in the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and the shapes of thought forms, are all attempts to visualise the invisible energies that flow through our bodies. Both colour and sound are vibrational energies and there are many examples of how sound can calm the soul and although the research surrounding colour theory is far less clear in terms of how effective colour can be in creating or changing mood, I have no doubt that colour's vibrational energy does effect emotional change. However after working with a wide range of people, I now realise that colour response is very personal and that it is not something that effects everyone's emotions in the same way. But that doesn't mean I cant use it, in fact because it is so personal, it opens a door for idiosyncratic visual responses to deep inter-personal communication and one-to-one conversations, which is where most of my work is initiated. I don't though normally have to agree with someone else if my imagery is communicating. Outside of the work in the hospital, I am free to take the imagery wherever I feel it needs to go. The construction of meaningful to myself colour communications has become an essential aspect of my recent work and although colour is hard to pin down, so are emotions and the more I go on to work in this area, the more I feel that it is in the struggle to find an authentic colour voice for a feeling, that I will find a something that allows me to communicate whatever it is that I need to communicate.
In my drawing conversations with people I often hear that they feel anxious, a state of mind that in Chinese culture is sometimes understood as a type of inner body chaos, or the blowing of 'internal winds' and sometimes their descriptions of the internal state of their bodies are less like a medical anatomy diagram and more like an immersion into a strange landscape or contact with alien energies. In Chinese medicine, our bodies are regarded as elements of and inseparable from, the natural world. We are an embodiment of the Earth and the Universe, the patterns of internal change that occur in our bodies, resonate with the external forms of landscape. All are manifestations of the universal Qi, the “substratum of the cosmos,” the essential quality of being, that I personally think of as another type of underlying vibration.
Each of these understandings allows me to develop imagery. By working with a range of overlapping viewpoints I can cross fertilise ideas and allow myself the luxury of imaginative play, whereby I 'freeform' with the visual elements that I have surrounded myself with in the studio and play with various interconnections as they reveal themselves.
The more I work with others, the better prepared I am to set up workshops designed to help people develop their personal interoceptual visual language. These workshops have often involved communicating the things learnt during my one-to-one drawing conversation sessions. I work with people in pairs, helping them to respond to each other's growing awareness of a chosen interoceptual feeling. People often chose a painful experience to try to visualise, but someone in a group will quickly realise that it could be a pleasurable feeling or a very different feeling, such as one that gives you goose bumps, that could be explored. I always encourage this as my research is about the benefits of a wider awareness of interoception than just pain. Craig, in his article 'How do you feel?', a paper that he went on to develop as an excellent book with the same title, points to an awareness of interoception being central to our feelings of being alive and that it is essential to our development of a subjective image of our sentient selves across time. He demonstrates how important interoceptual feelings are and shows how they are inseparable from the way the body knows itself and that emotions are inextricably linked to everything from muscle tone, to a need to go to the toilet. I'm writing this post from a hotel bedroom in Gothenburg in Sweden, having just spent the last three days at a conference devoted to the current medical understanding of issues related to spinal injuries. I sat and drew during several presentations and as the conference went on, I found myself coming to another visual conclusion about the inner body, one more to do with dendritic shaped fibrous growth at the scale of microscopic neurons. I think this was because I had been reading Craig's book and he looks at the evolutionary history of our nervous systems. He welds together ideas about both physical and mental feelings being transmitted to the brain; in such a way that I have an image in my mind of an emotive feeling being no different to a feeling of coldness, when it comes to an electrical signal, carried by neurons and stimulating the brain to make a decision about an action. I also began drawing mice and monkeys, perhaps to make sure I did not forget how grateful we should be to their contributions to spinal injury research. When I draw a monkey, it is a substitution for myself, an image that reminds me I am an animal also. I do realise that without the research that is done we would not be able to further our knowledge but I hope that when animals are used great care is taken to treat them with respect and to minimalise their discomfort and pain.
In their book, 'Your Brain on Art', Magsamen and Ross use the term 'neuroarts', which is defined as 'the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behaviour.' When highlighting art's effect on pain awareness and how it can shape it, they state in relation to people interacting with an art form, (2025, p. 37), 'The physical pain may still exist, but how they emotionally relate to that pain has changed'. It is the visualisation of both a change in emotional relationship and an awareness that the physical nature of our insides is intertwined with these emotional changes, that I hope to continue to develop my art practice out of. It takes me into the unknown, which is where as an artist I need to be, but not only that it gives me an audience that perhaps for the first time begin to see that shapes and forms might actually carry information and communicate it in ways that they had never previously noticed.
However I'm also still probing around at that old problem, of how in making an image do you represent a feeling of being alive? In German there is a term 'zitterbewegung', a sense of vibrating, oscillating energies, that is often associated with quantum mechanics, a term I quite like as it deals with things we cant see, but which need to happen if the things we can see are to behave in ways that result in the world appearing to be as it does. The hidden processes that go on inside our bodies are for myself similar, if they go wrong, the outward appearance of the external body is also changed, another tied together set of happenings.
The making of an animation based on a feeling of the body as a landscape, is one approach I am taking to the visualisation of inner and outer somatic interrelationships, hoping that after watching it, someone might be able to put their own inner body feelings into action and thus begin their own journey to externalise feelings. As well as exploring how some existing interoceptual visualisations of inner body forms could be animated, I've been looking at Faraday wave phenomena, another aspect of vibrational energy depiction, that I've intuitively linked to a personal understanding of the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc.
Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and Dr. M. Adam, must have at one point in time conjoined to produce the image above. Their activities were I'm sure serious and purposeful and I would like to think that they felt that they had seen something special related to the invisible nature of our existence. They may even have found a way to visualise dark matter, not that it matters, what does matter for myself is the never ending journey of enquiry that as a species we continue to go on, each generation trying in its own way to find ways to visualise those things that we cant see, but which underpin everything that we do.
Recent attempts to make images based on a feeling have been made in response to my own asthma. That harsh rasping feel of lungs struggling is one I know well, but to make an image of it is challenging. This time I have tried to think more about spatial aspects and have looked at stretch, perspective and our sense of vertigo when we are too high up and looking down. I never quite get it right, but each time I try something emerges and as it does it adds to the iconography of inner body speculation.
References
Craig, A. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nat Rev Neurosci 3, 655–666 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894Craig, A. (2014) How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self London: Princeton University Press
Magsamen, S. and Ross, I. (2025) Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us Edinburgh: Canongate
