Drawing

Wednesday, 24 September 2025

The edges of drawings and things

I gave a talk recently to the Drawing Research Network, it was their 2025 conference entitled: 'Drawing Negation: Emergence' and was part of an online symposium.

This is how my talk was introduced in the blurb that advertised what was going to be delivered:

Garry Barker’s presentation, 'The Emergence of Distinction in the Visualisation of Interoception: Drawing as a Boundary-Making Act', will explore the parallels between the inception of drawing as a distinction between one thing and something else, the evolution of human territoriality, and the conceptualisation of the universe’s origin. It argues that during workshops designed to help participants visualise interoceptual experiences; that it became important to develop an understanding of drawing as a primary act of distinction. Defining a somatic feeling is linked to the introduction of fundamental mathematical logic and biological processes observed in nature. By examining the philosophical underpinnings of Spencer-Brown’s 'Laws of Form' alongside the evolutionary context of boundary-making in animals, and the visualisation of embodied thinking through drawing, this presentation seeks to articulate how drawing reflects an intrinsic human impulse to mark territory and create meaning from the void of our own bodies.

The presentation posits the significant parallels between the moment a drawing begins, the territorial nature of human and animal existence, and our understanding of the inception of the universe itself and that the mark making that lies at the centre of the act of drawing, is in its most elemental form, a distinction-making process.

Using images made in response to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, alongside images of mathematical set theory and animal territorial marking, the presentation will unfold relationships that are designed to illustrate how an evolution of signalling, from unicellular organisms to human art forms, reflects an intrinsic animal as well as material need to mark distinctions as we attempt to articulate our existence within the universe.

Reading the introduction again after a few weeks makes me cringe, but the core of what I was going to talk about is there. I was trying to get at some sort of ontological core, an attempt to look at what underlies certain types of abstract thinking and to suggest that deep down underneath their conception lies some form of reality that stems from how things are. In particular I was thinking about the idea of edges between things and boundaries.

A long time ago I put up a blog post about edges, which was where at the time my thinking was and as I've moved on somewhat since then, thought it time to revisit a pretty fundamental question, where are the edges of a drawing? A question that is inseparable from another one; where are the edges of anything?

This is not as simple a question as it might seem and in my presentation I explored the idea of a drawing's edges being about boundaries and I further argued that boundaries were themselves concepts that had emerged from the evolution of all animal species. So what did I mean?

Diagram of an amoeba

In my drawing of an amoeba above I have used a dashed line to define its edges, rather than a continuous one. This is to suggest that an amoeba's boundaries are permeable. If not the amoeba would not be able to catch food and eat it, it would also not be able to remove waste. On the other hand if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve out into the water it lives within. We are as a biological entity, very similar to the amoeba and we also need to bring certain things into our bodies, such as air and nutrients as well as have ways to remove waste materials. Our bodies are constantly being interpenetrated by sweat, urine, liquids, food, faeces, snot, air, wax and mucus, there being a constant going into and coming out of the world into which we are embedded.

I thought this diagram of the body was interesting, as it transforms it into a flat rectangle. It is now in essence no different to a sheet of paper. All drawings of the body flatten it out, but they often include visual clues that remind us that the body is in reality a three dimensional object. Greenberg reminded us that when engaged in making art on a flat surface, any form of illusion designed to make us think that what we are looking at is 'real', is in effect a lie. I suspect therefore that he would have far preferred the drawing of the body above to the one below.

Max Brodel: The throat

I have written about Max Brodel's work in an earlier post and I commented upon his attempts to give heightened realism to his images by developing unique methods of textural manipulation, so that his surfaces resembled the 'wetness' of our insides. These images in effect 'suck us into' the paper on which they are made. We are pulled through the paper's boundary by an act of illusion.

However information still needs to flow in and out of a drawing and as its edges are where it meets the rest of the world, we can in our minds, begin to see a close analogy with the amoeba drawing above, as well as with the flattened out image of the body's various systems whereby it interacts with the exterior world.

Every drawing sits within the world

As it is looked at a drawing is constantly in some sort of exchange with the perceiver and the surrounding world. There will also, as in any communication, be a lot of wastage, whether we like it or not. What interests me in this instance, is the fact that what is percolating in and out of the drawing is often unknown, but you sense it is something. The drawing is in effect changing the world, just as the drawing's situation in the world changes it.

The space between the edge of a drawing and the world

Deridda has written extensively about the space between the edge of a drawing and the surrounding 'real' world and he uses the term ‘the parergon’ to describe it. He understands this space as one that is always coming “against or beside, the work that has been done", he states that "it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside, but neither simply outside nor simply inside”. He uses, after looking at drapery and colonnades, an example of the frame to explain what he means. (Derrida, p. 24, 1979) The space indicated by a frame being the boundary between the way we think about art and the way we act within the world. In my 'frame' drawing above, the space/frame includes traces of the marks I used to indicate various passages between a drawing and its environment, the space/frame being activated by the exchanges.

Edges are strange things. As I look around me I see a table top, it has edges, the sort that are defined by an abrupt change in direction. My eyes sweep horizontality across the desk surface, and then as I come to its edges, each one stops with a dramatic vertical drop. This experience is a common one associated with furniture. On the table top is a laptop computer. It too is seen to lie in a horizontal plane and has a vertical drop at the edges of its now closed screen, but the drop is no more than a centimetre, therefore I see the laptop as belonging in some way to the table, it sits within a shallow space that appears to unify several other items that are also lying on the table. A book, some sheets of paper, an old I-pod. They are all rectangular and have edges. Their horizontality is defined by the table top, if the table top had been raised on one side to form a steep angle, all of these objects would also have had to follow suit, until they began to slide down the table top and fell onto the floor. They are also all perceptually permeable. Each one acting in a slightly different manner as it interacts with the wider world.

For instance the book is something that as an object can be opened and closed. It is clearly entitled 'Picasso's Animals'. As I open it I'm faced with a text about Picasso's relationship with goats. For his 75th birthday he wanted a goat and although one did not arrive on his actual birthday, two did eventually materialise. Why do I remember this, perhaps because it is my 75th birthday this week and I have had great difficulty thinking about what people could get me. A goat was not on my birthday list and if I had put one on it I doubt if anyone would have responded. Once closed the book presents me with an image of a Picasso drawing of an owl, its eyes made from a photographic collage of cut out human eyes, eyes that I suspect came from a cut up photograph of himself. The book is an object with very clear boundaries or edges, but it is leaking into my mind, because my perceptual apparatus embraces it within a visual and tactile framework, that is wired into all my brain's existing preconceptions.

The lap top computer is now open, it has to be open so that I can type the words I'm typing. I had to break or cross a boundary to get in. I needed to put in a password on opening the computer by raising its lid, which itself contains its screen. It's edges or boundaries appear to be very different to the book. It is linked to invisible things such as the Internet and an electricity supply. I can push a memory stick into one of its ports and pull information out of it and interact with it myself directly by pushing down on the various keys in front of me. Like the book I can read text as it appears on the screen, as I do from an open page, but I can also create text, as I do now. I am sucked into the interface by a variety of engaging interactive components and it feels even more porous than the book. It not only seems to leak into my mind, it seems to be feeling out other minds too, this blog page, will as soon as it is published be available to all sorts of people, many of whom I have never met.

There is a drawing on the desk, it is drawn on an open right side notebook page and sits next to couple of written notes that were made on the left hand page. The writing states:

He will live on in memories.

Order sealing wax.

To send off a skimming stone for Oscar.

Ken tells me Oscar is dead.
He does not publicly mourn his son.

The writing reminds me of something I need to do. A private ritual that will mean nothing to anyone else but myself. The words on that page, leaving the table and yet not leaving the table. They can be read by others but without an understanding of the full context. It's getting dark and I'm going to stop typing for a while, I shall return tomorrow morning and when I do, as I walk into the room I will again see these items lying on a table top, initially inert, reserved within their respective boundaries, their edges though begin fraying, as soon as I enter the room.

The edges of these things are their surfaces, but most surfaces when you get very close to them become full of holes. In particular paper is extremely perforated.

Microscopic view of a 'flat' paper surface

In order to contain an image, we often put a frame around it. The frame reinforces our awareness of the edge in two directions. A frame puts glass or transparent perspex material over the top surface of a drawing and a wooden surround around its four edges. The surface acts as a type of boundary membrane, but so do the edges, which can also be seen as a type of boundary. In fact if we hold up the drawing within a frame such as those devised by Lina Bo Bardi, we can see clearly that the back of a drawing is also permeable to our gaze.

Lina Bo Bardi: Glass easels

As I have already pointed out, Derrida used the word 'parergon' to define a sort of "supplement" to the main thing. Think in this case of a drawing being the main thing and its frame a secondary object. However Derrida being Derrida, decides that this relationship between the core and the periphery can be reversed. The supplement, the outside or secondary object, can be seen to be the centrepiece. Without a frame, the thing framed "cannot distinguish itself from itself". In my mind Derrida's frame is a sort of psychic space around an object that allows it to be itself and yet also interact with the rest of the world. This is the amoeba solution. Its boundaries need to be permeable. If not the object or drawing or thing, would not be able to nourish or maintain itself and if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve into the surrounding environment. This is I realise another animist interpretation, but as a materialist, everything has I believe at some point to be able to merge and interconnect with everything else.
Derrida as a writer often thinks of things as bookish realities, at one point describing the parergon as a book's liminal text. A liminal space is one such as a doorstep, a place between things, a space you need to pass through in order to get from one space to another. It can be thought of as a mediator, something that helps us to become engaged with the main event. In Derrida's mind perhaps a title, a foreword, a preface or even an index or commentary. In this case the help may become a far more potent item than the original text, by being more succinct and therefore more understandable, the supplement now becoming the driver. Lina Bo Bardi's glass easels are sometimes more visually powerful than the drawings or paintings they are meant to display, by framing the artworks in a new way, we are encouraged to approach them differently, we may for instance spend as much time exploring the back of an image as its front.

Thinking about the edge of things, eventually opens out an issue about 'thingness'. The idea of a thing is that it is separate from other things. But as I have pointed out, all things are in constant interconnection. Communication between things suggests that the edges of things are always frayed and that things bleed into one another. If we get close enough to things we can see how porous they really are, all living things requiring points for the surrounding world's entry and exit and all inorganic matter needing to engage in the quantum flux of spacetime, which enfolds everything in its various energy fields. The edge is therefore a boundary that is in reality simply an idea, a concept that allows us to decide where one thing begins and ends, rather than it being any sort of fixed reality.

We should never forget that when animals set out to define their territory, that boundary within which they live most of their lives, many of them do so by using their body's waste products, either defalcating or urinating to mark out the perimeters. The micro project of an amoeba, becoming an evolutionary reinvention on a macro scale. Once a territory is defined an animal can begin to think about doing other things, as they are no longer having to constantly think about how to defend borders, their olfactory signs doing that for them. Perhaps these signs can be thought of as first drawings, being both markers and definitions of physical space, that are also intimations of a creature's need for a mental space within which to do something more than just survive.

Rhino marking territory

Reference:

Derrida, J. & Owens, C. (1979)The Parergon October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 3-41 (39 pages) https://doi.org/10.2307/778319

A recording of the Drawing Research online symposium, where you can listen to the talks given, including my own.

See also:

Edges

Thursday, 18 September 2025

Interoceptual portraits

I have been taking the work on interoception into another area, that of portraiture. I have for many years been fascinated by Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' a late nineteenth century Gothic novel, whereby the deeds perpetrated by an evil man, are reflected in the changes made to the features of a hidden portrait, rather than to the face of the man who perpetrated the deeds. At that time there was much interest in physiognomy, the art of judging character from facial characteristics and in response to this, Wilde developed an idea based on a sort of reverse engineering, whereby you can measure the depth of depravity that someone is sinking into by watching their face transform over the years. If only this were true. I can still remember the first time I saw the Ivan Albright painting he made for the film 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. In the 1945 Albert Lewin directed film, the first part had included two colour inserts of a painting made of the youthful handsome Dorian Gray (in reality painted by Henrique Medina) and then later in the film you had two frightening technicolour reveals of Albright's degenerate image of what in reality Gray had become. Albright's painting would haunt me from then on.

Dorian Gray by Henrique Medina 1944

Ivan Albright Picture of Dorian Gray: 1944

I thought I saw glimpses of Albright's insight into the human condition in Francis Bacon's work and I was reminded of this when an artist I had been working with in conjunction with an Italian artist to develop ideas for interoceptual portraits, sent me a Simon Shama quote; ‘What Bacon liked about George Dyer was not the assembly of features… what he liked was the inside of him and the way that pressed against the outside, the whole slithery jumble of a person’.

Francis Bacon: Study for a portrait of George Dyer

The phrase, "The whole slithery jumble of a person". struck home, and when it came to my own recent self-portrait, I found myself dealing with disintegrating forms alongside a colour struggle using complementary opposites, both ideas being used to build a psychological idea of an inner duality.

Interoceptual Self portrait

The two artists I have been working with have just sent me some objects through the post, which was a way of getting some sort of physical contact into a situation whereby we have been trying to make images of each other via computer screens. There is something much more authentic about touch and even though we are all three separated by many miles, the few objects that I can hold in the hand and pick up to look at, close those geographical distances right down to the surface of my fingers. Our portraits of each other have been developing over the years. But this time we sent objects and images to act as some sort of catalyst or stimulus to the making. As always these things are as much self-portraits as portraits of others, but the process of an image's arrival is always intriguing. In the case of the image I made responding to the objects in one parcel, I first of all glued down a shirt pattern that was enclosed and then I responded to the same artist's mono-print of a skull. As I was working between several things in the studio, I on purpose didn't think deeply about what I was making, I just kept doing stuff. As Johns put it, "do something and then do something else", or something like that. I.e. keep responding and making things happen and only later go back and see if anything works or not.

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of another English artist

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of an Italian artist

There is as you can hopefully see in the image above, a strange form emerging from the head of the figure. It is like a shell and has a red rose like form sitting over what would in a more conventional portrait be the brow. It is the product of one of our exchanges, but as always there is very little logic in my image development process. One of the things I was sent from Italy was a small nest like object, it was made of fabric, wrapped in rusty wire and other metal pieces and in its centre was a plaster form, its shape like a pebble brain. My artist corespondent had made a metaphor for her brain. I had sent to her a pair of ceramic legs that I had modelled on an idea of the hut of the Baba Yaga, which is always in illustrated books depicted as a hut carried on giant chicken legs. Without the legs the hut would just be a hut, but with them it became something fabulous. I had sent these legs to both my artist collaborators because I wanted them to think about using the legs to make something of their own fabulous, in the old sense of the word, as something magical, mythical or relating to a fable. When I looked at the nest I realised I needed to put it on similar legs, as I did it became alive and it took over my image making process. It had invoked some form of sympathetic magic.

Portraits of an artist's brain as a mythical creature

Part of my research into the raising of awareness of interoceptual feelings has been to look at the work of illustrators who have been working to visualise its importance. A really good example was the illustrative work of Abby VanMuijen and after looking it, I decided that she had already done some excellent work that focused on the core issues involved and decided therefore that I didn't need to retread the same path, but would continue to push for some sort of visual synthesis between my own more idiosyncratic language and the diagrams of emotional range and pain awareness that I had also been looking at. I was particularly interested in the fact that she kept the same image as an underpinning form and changed the colour to fit the emotional movement.

Abby VanMuijen

I therefore decided to try a similar approach; initially taking my interoceptual self portrait and changing the colour palette to see if I could demonstrate an emotional shift, but combining emotions to see if it was possible to communicate that ever morphing sense of life's instability and constant change.

Surprise and disapproval

Anger and remorse

Acceptance and sadness

Interoceptual self portraits with colour changes suggesting mood swings

The initial image has a much more nuanced colour range, colours push against each other, my experience being that our emotional range shifts and moves in a complex manner. If like Abby VanMuijen I push the colour range into the primaries, emotion changes but it is simplified, therefore I have decided to look at complex mixes.

Robert Plutchik, the colour wheel of emotions

I'm gradually bringing my ideas together but as always I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, mainly feeling for something rather that following a logical path. I have looked at Robert Plutchik's work for a while now and although I can see all sorts of problems with it, it does open a door for me, so why not I thought step through it?

Friday, 12 September 2025

Desire lines

Drawings are made both consciously and unconsciously, and not always with our hands or by humans. Some drawings are traces of repeated activity and desire paths fall into this category.

A desire path

Richard Long's walked lines are another type of desire path, but this time with an aesthetic intent. However these lines are not just things that humans make. A game path is a naturally occurring pathway made by animals.

A game path

A human/animal desire path heading towards water

Desire lines are paths that speak of wanting to get places or do things and the more we realise animals like ourselves are emotional beings that also have desires, perhaps we can develop an understanding of a reality that links together the lives of animals and humans. It’s been suggested that fifteen journeys are all that’s required to designate a fresh desire path, but I would suggest all that is really needed is one animal to go off in one new direction. Once that has happened, others will follow. However the faint trace of another life moving ahead before us, perhaps offers grace rather than instruction; in the sense that grace is a sort of undeserved favour, a path resulting from another's adventurous spirit, being in effect a gift.

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of the road system. Roads have evolved from animal tracks; first the animals wear down the vegetation, then humans follow these tracks on foot. In another era humans will ride these paths on horse-back before eventually widening them as track ways for horse-drawn carriages and then eventually in times much closer to now, they will have become metalled roads for cars. Eventually what were desire lines become fixed by an ordnance survey as roads on a map.

I've recently returned from West Wittering and we foolishly decided to let the sat nav direct us back to Leeds and we had a very strange journey, it was almost as if the sat nav was arbitrarily deciding which roads to take. It reminded me of being a boy and staring at maps and wondering where those roads might take me and what sorts of experiences they might lead to. The idea that following a road can lead to self-discovery or mystical transformation is a common theme in literature and philosophy. It suggests that the journey, both physical and metaphorical, can be a powerful catalyst for personal growth and spiritual awakening, in particular, the concept of the "road less traveled," means that venturing off the beaten path can lead to unique insights and experiences. Following a road may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or help us to undergo a mystical transformation. Each desire line when begun, is indeed a newly beaten path, taking its maker into spaces as yet untrodden.

The road systems of England

In our present time, desire paths are made when we step off Google map and let our intuition decide our fate. They seek out connections between where we are and where we wish to be. Instead of being worn into shape by the pressure of passing feet, they are perhaps unique connections being made between information sets, or possibilities being seen for the first time; they’re indications that there is another way. A desire path is also a trace, often left behind because of someone following an impulse; or a desire to find a new territory.

Animal paths

If we reverse engineer a road, we might at some point come back to its past existence as an animal track. Most animals are territorial. They walk between places to feed, to drink, to rest and to find others. The landscape itself will direct which route to take, as it provides trees and rocks to move around, gentler and steeper slopes, trees as rain cover or grasses to eat on the way. In effect the landscape wraps itself round the animal. The desire lines animals follow are also in effect, like the lines of an animal 'Wyrd', whereby the invisible lines of each animal's psyche are wrapped around the world as they pass through it and as they do the animal's destiny is woven. The word wyrd comes from the Proto-Germanic word 'wurđiz', a noun derived from the verb werþanan, meaning "to become". As we pass through life we become who we are, this is our fate. This Anglo-Saxon concept, still seems to myself to make sense, like all animals, our life lines are inextricably entangled into the world we inhabit.

Desire is what shapes us; as we are shaped we begin to define ourselves and to do this we use tools, one of which is the mirror. The mirror allows us to see ourselves from the outside, in effect we become part of the landscape we inhabit. Like all the landscapes we traverse, we can change them by stepping off the desire paths we have chosen and starting a new one. One desire line can be our hair parting and by simply changing the 'normal' line of parting taken by our hair, we can in effect change our personality.

Hair parting lines

There is a widespread cultural belief concerning how hair partings change a person’s looks. The general consensus seems to be that parting on one’s left makes a person look competent and masculine, whereas parting on the right makes a person look warm and feminine. In the Christopher Reeves Superman films when he was acting the Clark Kent character, his hair was parted on the right, but when he was Superman, his hair was parted on the left. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to research this and then to persuade the make-up department that this was an essential part of the character transformation.

Christopher Reeves

For most people, the way you part your hair is instinctive. But there are times in your life when you feel the need to change, just as when you decide to step off the pavement and head out over rough ground to see if you can get to somewhere else. When you do that, eventually the new direction is worn into your path, you in effect own it, it is a sort of 'signature' path.

Desire lines can of course also be found in the markings you make in your own artwork, some drawings reveal traces of repeated activity, certain forms recurring over and over again.

Theresa Murdza

The wondering wobbly circles that pass through this drawing by Theresa Murdza, are her desire lines. Just as desire paths are ones we take as we walk towards something, these lines are ones made as she draws towards something. Once decided upon and enacted we tend to repeat our journeys, which is why artists tend to repeat the types of marks they make.

Brenda Holzke

As we repeat a mark quality, it becomes a sort of artist's signature. I often draw using pen and ink, the thickening and thinning and hand speed associated with the application of these marks forming my own work's 'desire lines'.

A page from one of my sketchbooks

Paul Klee

Page from Klee's Pedagogical Notebook

As Klee takes his lines for a walk, he is in effect developing 'desire lines'.

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of types of drawing within the art canon. Approaches to drawing have evolved from one artist to another; first of all one artist will wear down the thick vegetation that surrounds the prevailing approaches to drawing, then other humans will follow these tracks. As more and more artists ride these paths they will eventually widen them so that they become roadways. Just as in the paths we follow out in the wider world; following these roads may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or even help us to undergo a mystical transformation. A line can take many paths, some short and some long, some straight and some twisted and as metaphors for life, lines are asked to act out a huge multitude of narratives. Each line has though to be finally cut, or as Milton puts it, "Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life". Each line scissored by the Fate Atropos, when its story is complete and its owner has fulfilled their destiny.

Saturday, 6 September 2025

Diagrams as levers for change

Donut Economics: Kate Raworth

I have posted a copy of Kate Raworth's diagram before, it is a diagram that can be read as a lever for change. It recognises that we need to change the way we operate if we are to survive. Kate Raworth points to Donella Meadows (1941-2001) as her guide. Meadows was the lead author of insightful book The Limits to Growth, in 1972, she helped to highlight the fact that exponential population increase that doesn’t reduce consumption levels will eventually lead to a sudden and uncontrollable decline in resources.

Diagrams are forms of drawing that help us to see how things fit together and any system that embraces collaboration, recognises interdependencies, and helps us to understand how everything is interconnected can benefit from being visualised in diagrammatic form.

I can still remember the first diagrams I used in relation to systems thinking. I was undertaking a training course for Further Education managers back in around the mid 1990s. As part of the course I was given a challenge to think about how as managers we could think about the future needs of our sector and implement changes within the institutions that we worked in. I had to come up with a way to convince other managers that my ideas would work, so as a visual thinker, I decided to use diagrammatic drawing as my main rhetorical device. I had seen some systems diagrams based on grids, whereby information came in from one side and was enmeshed into a complex of factors that became entangled, but then reconciled and actions then emerged from the other side. In particular the contextual studies area of my college, (Leeds College of Art was not a university at the time) had for sometime been advocating the ideas expressed in E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' and students had been introduced via Schumacher's ideas to systems thinking. I was also becoming more interested in the idea of 'flow' and staff on the Foundation course at Leeds where I taught had come up with various 'flow' diagrams, illustrating how real world experience and visual language could become fused together to create new ideas.

Design for a better art college 1990s

I presented my idea of the educational process as a series of flowing wave like movements to the then new principal. It was heavily criticised as being unworkable and naive and I realised I was seen as a typical arty type by him. I was soon gone from the management team, the then principal criticising me for my constant need to understand why we might be doing things, rather than me just telling people what needed to be done, which is what he wanted managers for. Even so, my early experience of systems thinking did stick and I have remained convinced that diagrams can be used as levers for change.

Systems thinking has moved on considerably since then. The diagrams below offering a few tools that might help someone setting out to think about how to choose an approach.

Systems thinking

A diagram can be used as a collaborative tool for regenerative and transformative change. For instance when looking for an ecosocial equilibrium that a society might try to establish, diagrams were used to help people think about how to collaborate. By seeing yourself as part of an overall plan, it gets easier to both have belief in what you are doing and to feel supported in your beliefs by others who have agreed that the diagram works for them too.

My worry with diagrams is how much annotation they need in order to be understandable. The ecosocial diagram above that uses the triple infinity symbol, needs a vast amount of text to anchor it and give any meaning to it. Even when I read the text several times, I still am not sure what it means. Balance and flow are obviously good things, but the text that is used to show how these are achieved feels too like a hopeful wish-list.

Diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank should operate

I drew a diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank operated for the Proto-Publics research project. At the time I was part of the management group of the Timebank and I firmly believed that this could be a way of developing a non cash economy. Looking back on those days, we were perhaps naive but the diagram still feels as if it has some sort of dynamic agency and that it represents possibilities of how people could support each other by offering their particular skills. However it is not annotated and therefore it is very hard for someone from outside the organisation to get an idea of what is going on.

Mark Lombardi

Diagrams have also been used by artists to reveal hidden structures and to give people the information needed to effect change. For instance Mark Lombardi's drawings of relationships that illustrated the connections that people in power had and the resultant networks that enabled them to exercise their power. His drawings often reminded me of organic life forms. The patternings of connections between people, were also not unlike the interconnections we make using our own neural pathways. Hans Haacke's, 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971', was a diagrammatic illustration of ownership. In this instance the New York properties of a single slumlord, were investigated through charts, maps and photographs. Both artists allowing the diagrammatic form to reveal the hidden interconnections that shape people's lives, rather than dealing directly with the emotional messiness of lives themselves. In this case information set out in a clear, easy to grasp, visual way, became the lever for change.

Hans Haacke: 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings'

Diagrams can also help us confront ourselves and how as we gather new knowledge we need to change in order to be able to deal with it. For instance if we are to change we need to grasp the fact that this is an emotional journey and that it isn't always straightforward.

All change is an emotional ride, one that I'm beginning to understand as something to either experience as exciting and exhilarating or something to fear and hide away from. Hopefully I can embrace the former and move beyond my fears and worries about what might happen. There are always other people out there who also think in similar ways, other artists that have taken similar paths. In 2023 the Marlborough Gallery in new York put on an exhibition entitled, 'Schema: World as Diagram'. It was an exhibition designed to highlight how artists had often been drawn to the diagrammatic in order to express their ideas.

Loren Munk: The Ontology of Art: 2016

Thomas Hirschhorn: Schema art and public space: 2016-22

Some diagrams seemed overly simplistic and others almost as confusing as the mess that they were trying to understand, but running throughout the exhibition was a sense that diagrams allow us to render visible what would otherwise remain unseen.

I can see an interesting issue in relation to my recent thinking. When I was looking at how to visualise issues related to getting older, I came up with a diagram that allowed me to communicate ideas about the various stages of ageing. I wanted to at the same time find an overall image that gave the diagram shape and a more mythic context.

Diagram of the ageing process

In order to get to the final image, I had looked at images based on simplifications of a scarab beetle form. In particular scarab beetle were symbols of rebirth, resurrection, transformation, and growth and I wanted to implant within the diagram an idea that old age can still be a time of transformation, and growth.

As you can see from the image below, at one point the diagram was very scarab beetle shaped, but I wanted a less obvious image and perhaps looking back the scarab design would have been better, as it communicated the idea more clearly.

The struggle to find an image as well as at the same time to make a diagram, reminded me of Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. The image was driving the diagram into another territory of visual thinking, it was becoming an ambiguous image. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvellous. I wasn't sure where I wanted my images to lie and I think they fell between two stools, not quite clear enough as diagrams and not quite strong enough as images. But the idea that I could bring my interoceptual imagery into a format that included more diagrammatic ways of working, still I think holds water.

Perception, reality and the cosmos

The mash-up between diagram and image, can be sometimes confusing, but also intriguing, well at least for myself. In the image above I was attempting to bring together several strands of my thinking together and place them within a more cosmic context. In comparison though, Pablo Carlos Budassi's diagrams are far more cosmic.

The observable universe: A logarithmic illustration: Pablo Carlos Budassi

Pablo Carlos Budassi is a musician as well as an illustrator, he is probably rarely thought of as a fine artist, more an infographic designer, but his work has made me think a lot about how different scales can be found to mesh together and although it could be argued that he often deals with clichéd imagery, the beauty of his constructions has convinced me that he is an authentic artist, very worth looking at, especially if you want to get a feeling for how everything might possibly fit together. I still do like my own idea though, perhaps simply because it includes my coffee cup, masquerading as a devil, as well as that spiral, that keeps reoccurring over and over again.