The search for an image

Urinary tract infection

The image above was put together today and it arrived out of a complex series of decisions and experiences. The most pressing was an attempt by myself to respond to a very painful urinary tract infection before I began to lose my memories of what had been felt. One of the most startling aspects of having the infection was the sudden appearance of blood in my urine. I was needing to urinate while in a hospital waiting area, eventually finding a toilet and instead of getting the relief of urinary pressure, I was shocked by the sight of red blood against the white of the ceramic toilet. I had had and still have pain in my left testicle, although due to antibiotics kicking in this is much reduced. This is linked to pains in my lower back. But the worst conjunction of pain was a combination of constipation and ache caused by the infection, alongside a need to both urinate and defecate, neither of which I could do. I have been making drawings and trying to respond to my feelings about this, and have been attempting to find an image that is for myself a summation of what I felt, something that compresses several days pain and worry into itself. Eventually I found that I could bring together two previously existing images to create a new one, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed the surprise for myself of the conjunction of a red soaked form with a black and white one. I had been using linocut recently, for the first time for years, so that the language of lino was still something I was in touch with or feeling inside. This was an image made as a guide or study for a lino print and was constructed digitally, and working on a computer was more of a necessity because I was working from bed. I needed an image that at some point within it squeezed everything into a narrow channel, an image that felt as if it was too full, an image that was spiky with pain, but above all an image that was about the dangling nature of an in the mind, damaged testicle. So there you have it. I will at some point make a proper linocut of this, but that will be dependent on access to facilities. But is it a good image? In fact, what is a good image? Does it do the job? Can it communicate in such a way that it seems to make sense, without it being simply an illustration? What as an image does it bring to the table? What is the 'extra' it offers?

Edward Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. It stated, "Art is...the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world. That is what I am doing both when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves and/or when I'm trying to visualise how I see any other aspects of my experience. But not always, sometimes I think I work backwards or upside down. I'm an artist driven to look for images that for one reason or another hold attention and break through to people, even in a world already 'image soaked'. But what do I mean by this? Again I suppose I'll have to circle around the idea in order to begin to tease out some sort of understanding, as these things are never straight forward. Perhaps I'll begin with Barthes.
Roland Barthes in his 1980 book 'Camera Lucida', used the word 'punctum' to describe an unintended, sharp detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pierces, wounds, or deeply moves the viewer on a personal level. I was very taken by this when I first read it and have often misused the word 'punctum' as a way of asking myself and others why any image, not just a photograph, may stick in the mind, or become memorable in some way. Barthes uses the word to refer to a specific element that "jumps out" of an image and 'pricks' the spectator's conscience or emotion. This is for him something unplanned and unexpected, as it relies entirely on the viewer's private history, memories, and associations. For instance a small detail in a photograph may cause you to remember an incident from your past that was very meaningful to you, but perhaps would not be to anyone else. Barthes contrasted this to what he called the studium; the polite, educated understanding of what the photograph is about and what the photographer intended, the punctum in comparison being the disruptive element that breaks through our detachment and striking the viewer with visceral, emotional intensity.
This is one aspect of the search for an image that I'm interested in but it is just that, an aspect, for instance some images hold your attention because of a intellectually stimulating conjunction of image and idea, such as those produced by Mark Tansey, others are simply uncanny (das Unheimliche) having that unsettling psychological feeling, as when something simultaneously feels deeply familiar and strangely alien, such as Meret Oppenheim's 'Object', her fur covered tea cup from 1936, which even after all these years of being exhibited as a classic surreal object, is an image that sticks in the mind. 

Meret Oppenheim 'Object',

However I cant use the tropes of Surrealism any more because they are of a type, or what I would now call if using the term beyond the world of photography, the 'studium'; the educated understanding of what the image is about. Finding an 'image' is a hard thing, because it is doubly hard to surprise yourself, especially when you are like myself someone who has been in the art business for a long time, and have therefore seen a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it is easier to be a naive artist, or perhaps not, as people sort of expect naive artists to behave in certain ways, thus beginning for myself, to eliminate the unexpected before I've even seen the work. When I recently went to look through a magazine focused on outsider art, my first thought was that it all looked like 'outsider art', somehow outsiders had begun to know what they should be doing as outsiders. I want to be an insider who can at a chosen time turn inside out. 

That old idea of Goethe's that art is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, can of course be inverted, the reproduction of the world that is inside me by means of the world outside me, is a pretty good description of how I sometimes work when I'm trying to visualise interoceptual experiences. Again I'm looking for something that sticks or pricks that image of 'normality' or expectation. It's perhaps the opposite of 'like'. It is not 'nice'. An image is always 'uncomfortable' in some way. Therefore it has to have an element of surprise. 

In order for the unexpected to be be revealed you have to get lost. To get lost implies action. You are doing, and this is very important, you need to do stuff in order to makes things happen, but you also don't need to 'know' what you are doing. Jasper Johns said, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." This is good and a starting point, but it only gets you so far. You also need to be able to pull out of the process in order to notice when something has happened. Johns also said, "I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort." I think this is more like it, something is found "to hold a kind of energy", an energy that is created by some sort of active juxtaposition of the elements that make up the image. There being some sort of friction that as it rubs off against itself, it sparks some sort of energy into life. If you can hold on to this, stick it down in some way, without smoothing it out, without finishing it off, well, then you might have an image. 

I was talking to my old friend Steve Carrick about this not long ago and he recommended that I read 'Unknowing' by Rebecca Forman, a book by its very title I could see that it was touching on the subject, but as yet I've not been able to find it. Perhaps he gave me a false trail, but if he did, it did lead to a thought in my head as to what this book could be about. 

I have followed the work of the painter Adrian Ghenie for a while, and have found him a very good example of an image maker. He 'stalks' his images in various ways, sometimes needing to use collage to stir things up and give him glimpses of the unexpected, but he can also use traditional drawing. 

Adrian Ghenie: Detail

Adrian Ghenie: Mobile phone user

During the time of Covid19 like all of us he was isolated, so he drew and one thing he drew were people with mobile phones. He drew them over and over again, rubbing out, redrawing, looking for what they could be. Strangely as the drawings progressed the one constant, the mobile phone in a hand, became the least interesting thing, it was what was doing the listening that was interesting; the who it was who was interacting with the phone had become a discovery. I realised it was as if he heard a phone ringing, and even though it wasn't his, he picked it up and used it as a portal to find an image for a portrait drawing. You sometimes have to do stuff like that to catch an image off guard. 

Urinary tract infection

These are the first 7 drawings I made in response to how I felt about my urinary infection. They are on small A6 sheets of thick paper, again small so that I could do them from bed, this time sitting on it's edge, using a large A3 sketchbook as a table. As is often my want, I was using a dip in pen and ink to establish the idea.

I then followed that session with another using a brush and various coloured liquids, this time slowing down and concentrating on initially one image. 

Coloured image

This was too complicated but pointed to some thoughts about flowing liquids. 

Testicle weight

I went back to the earlier images and picked an idea out that suggested more testicle weight. I started to react to the horror I had when seeing blood in my urine. So I took another tack.

Ist step peeing blood

At this point I returned to using the computer and began processing in Photoshop. 

The first image that seemed to be on its way to being an image

The image immediately above was the first one to intrigue me, this was the last one to emerge directly out of the drawings done as an attempt to capture the feeling tone I had in my body/mind about the situation I was experiencing. I had been in a lot of pain, I was worried as to what it might all mean and the sight of blood in my urine had frightened me. 

I returned to some images working by hand and others I began to edit on the computer. At this point I'm not worried as to the authenticity of working on paper or computer, I'm simply searching for an image.

Pain and heat

For instance I might as in this case, go back directly to a hand made image, scan it and then look to see what happens if certain colours are changed. In this case the coloured image above, is adjusted so that the warm colours are brought out around the groin area. The warmth of pain is one aspect I'm trying to visualise. 

As I was now working on my computer, I had easy access to older images, and began to look through some of them, knowing that I had made some before that might work. What I didn't realise was that I had already made separate images of the final elements I would end up using, but by letting these first sets of drawings go where they needed to go, they had established in my mind an idea of what was needed. Their materiality had allowed a thought to jell and they had triggered memories of recent images. I eventually found one which was of work done to prepare for a linocut, (this seemed a better resolution of my stomach/body) and the other of a shape that was at one point a cutout that I inserted into a much larger image, The point being that it was of an extension, something that I was feeling the testicles were. Notice no penis, in the night the blood seemed to flow directly out of me. Drawings of interoceptual experiences are not to do with any sort of accurate anatomy. The resulting images are neither literal representations of the body, nor simply illustrations, they are materialisations of a process of encounter. I'm now going back to images made on paper.

Peeing blood

See also:

Hopper, Seurat and the study

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders

Mathematics, rightness and underlying beauty

Composition within landscape painting

The drawings of Henri Michaux 

What's going on?

Ali Cherri, Totems (2022), at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, Venice (23 April–27 November 2022). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Roberto Marossi.

I remember several years ago being drawn to Ali Cherri's work 'The Gatekeepers' which drew on the tradition of erecting totem poles at the gates of certain communities, as a welcoming or a warning. Cherri was making hybrid forms that at first sight I was was confused as to whether this was a contemporary art practice or that of someone from an indigenous part of some country I had yet to encounter. He was tapping into a feeling that I thought I could sense, one that suggested that artists were trying to tap back into ways of working that built direct relationships between us and the world we inhabit. Artwork as portals into the world of the spirit. 

Ali Cherri: The Gatekeepers

Invoking figures inspired by the animal kingdom, The Gatekeepers, presented at the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Marseille, paid homage to the souls of all the naturalised animals housed in Marseille's Museum of Natural History, located just a few steps away. Ali Cherri collected curiosities, bought at auction or from antique dealers, from Marseille and elsewhere. Then he sought to restore to them a presence, by working with these found objects to make them 'strange' again, to give them back a magical presence. I'd a couple of years later seen his work at the Venice Biennale in 2022. I was interested in what he was doing, as at the time I decided it would be wonderful if every house had a warning object made for it by an artist, a sort of protecting spirit that would ward off intruders and protect those inside and I had made some trial pieces to fit on poles that could stand in someone's garden. But perhaps people also needed a welcoming form, one I then realised was already in place, something we call a Christmas wreath.

Christmas wreath.

I was also thinking at the time about Halloween and it is coming round again, so I must have a good look around at what people are doing. Someone down the road has had a large spider put up over their doorway. Every year when the girls were small, it was my job to cut out the face of the pumpkin lantern.

Halloween decorations

It's as if we have a need to at least once a year to just go and celebrate the uncanny, and recognise the fact that there might be other forces at work. Perhaps we all need a touch of magic. 

Back in 2022 during the time the Venice Biennale entitled 'The Milk of Dreams' was held, J. J. Charlesworth, one of the editors of ArtReview, wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Magic in Art'.

In the article he stated; 

 'If ideas of reason, rational action, science and progress are in decline, and if the human culture and consciousness formed by those ideas is dangerous and destructive, then the only alternative can be a return to the premodern: or rather not a return, but a dissolution of modernity and modern ways of thinking in the present. This is the cultural driver for the revival of the sacred and the mystical in art. Magic replaces science, belief replaces knowledge, ritual replaces rational action. Circular time replaces history. And as a corollary, the idea of the distinctly human subject, a being different in thought and action to the rest of nature, is dismissed as the hubris of the colonist and oppressor. While much ecological thinking grounds itself in science, it leads back to what is really the premodern mystical view of humans as participants intertwined with nonhuman entities as part of a greater, harmonious ecosphere. Much of the new mysticism in art regularly invokes the old countercultural tropes of psychedelic transcendence and the loss of the individual self to the collective and a greater planetary entity' He then ended the article with... 'but this time it’s in VR.'

I thought it a prescient article and I agreed with quite a lot of what he was saying except for the ending, whereby he decided that it was now VR that was going to carry the can, so to speak. Perhaps it's my age but I find VR very problematic, not least its ability to eat up resources as more and more data farms are built to serve the ever expanding needs of new technology. We have been here before, in the time of the First World War, the rise of Dada was a response to where science and so called modern civilisation had led us. The deaths of millions in the trenches was a lesson in hubris and artists were not slow to pick up on the fact that science had helped human beings develop more and more deadly weapons, whilst human nature was still in effect 'tribal' and using an operating system developed during a time when the most damage someone could inflict on other humans was by using a thrown rock. 

Leonora Carrington 

The title of the biennale,'The Milk of Dreams' was taken from one of Leonora Carrington's children's books. There had been an effort to readdress the gender balance in terms of historical representations at biennales and she was used as a sort of touchstone, in terms of sensibility. She viewed the artistic process itself as an alchemical act of transmutation, turning everyday materials and subconscious visions into sacred visual realities. She populated her works with magical beasts, giant goddesses, and human-animal hybrids and she was deeply versed in the Kabbalah, Mayan cosmology, and the Tarot. In particular, she reclaimed domestic spaces—like kitchens and cauldrons—as sites of ancient feminine power, healing, and sorcery rather than confinement, there was something about her that reminded me of my grandmother.

One of my blog posts on the 2022 Biennale was the first report on a Venice Biennale whereby I had felt confident enough to put a couple of images in of my own work, simply because I could see that the underlying theme was a pretty good fit of where I was at that time and in many ways still am. The difference is that over the last few years I have become more convinced that the world is again in danger of letting loose science led technologies that we have no idea of how harmful they may be. Because we are still in effect creatures of the Palaeolithic world, I believe we need to in some way return to ways of meaning making that link us all back into the world out of which we emerged. I don't mean by this we need to turn to formalised religions, but that some sort of spiritual need needs to be fed, if not we become mentally disturbed. Some people are already returning to 'nationalism', finding it feeds spiritual needs by providing individuals with a sense of meaning, filling the emotional and existential voids that we need to experience. It gives individuals a higher cause to live and potentially die for, transcending the mundane routines of daily life and it establishes a clear framework of right and wrong based on the loyalty to and preservation of the nation. The problem with this is it also leads very easily to posturing and aggression, which in turn lead to war and war is what brought out all the new weapons of destruction that we saw emerge during World War One. AI led drone technology is only the tip of an iceberg that would be brought into view if a new world war was ever started.

So why magic? Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic states that both truth and falsehood, as well as illusion may be used to effect change, you just have to see what works. He suggests that it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that actions produce tangible results, even though they might not be considered logical. Which is somewhat of a relief and when looking at the diagram (above) he produced to show how the four different modes of thinking were related, it is easy to see how art is firmly set within the quarter bounded by intuition and feeling, a place where I would expect imagination to be comfortably housed. Imagination is one of art's most powerful tools, it's use adds meaning to our lives by taking us out of ourselves and giving us new possibilities. Similar to art, magic uses imagination to create meaning and it is inseparable in its methodology from play. Dukes essentially strips magic of its mumbo jumbo and arcane symbology and gives it a sense of post-modern purpose, some of which I believe the arts can appropriate too.  

But how? There is an ancient Sumerian epic poem dating back to around 2100 BCE called the Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The poem contains a passage known to historians as "The Nam-shub of Enki." In this text, it is described that long ago, all of humanity spoke the exact same language and praised the god Enlil in unison. The god Enki, lord of wisdom, who was incidentally the deity related to crafts, but also subterranean waters, magic, and incantations, in his trickster mode, decided to change the speech in their mouths and "put contention into it," effectively fracturing humanity's single tongue into diverse languages. (An early Babel myth). In the text of the myth, the word nam-shub (nam-šub) translates to "incantation," "sung spell," or "magical speech. This nam-shub is a powerful idea, and was quoted within a novel by the writer Neal Stephenson, who uses text from the Sumerian epic and quotes it directly in his novel Snow Crash. Stephenson interprets this "incantation that fractures language" as the ultimate neurological anti-virus; a piece of code designed in the novel to shatter a universal mental interface, that had been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and bodies. In this case the nam-shub is used to ensure that humans would still have free will. I. e. Stephenson uses the old idea of magical speech, cloaked in the technological language of a modern world computer virus. In my case 'magical speech' is something I associate with the making of fetishes. It being the associated narrative that empowers the fetish. For instance, my reading of the function of the Mali Boli fetish is to accumulate and control the naturally occurring life force called nyama for the spiritual benefit of the community. 

Mali Boli fetish

These fetishes are complex creations created from esoteric recipes, or 'daliluw'. Animal bones, vegetable matter, honey, and metal are packed around an interior armature of bamboo wrapped in white cotton cloth, which are then covered with layers of mud and clay. Over time their surfaces accumulate related sacrificial materials, including chicken and goat blood, chewed kola nuts, alcohol, and millet porridge. Each added layer of material adds to the power narrative and as it does it lends the structure greater spiritual power. The disparate elements of which boliw (the plural of boli) are composed symbolise the various parts of the universe, so that the whole object can be read as a model of local cosmological belief. It has also been noted that a boli's sacrificial coatings are strikingly similar to the undigested contents of human stomachs, while its interior is made of materials generally associated with the body's exterior surrounding world. For this reason, they have sometimes been interpreted as portrayals of animals and people turned inside out, a sort of 4D transformation, as in H G Wells's 'The Plattner Story', whereby a schoolmaster disappears after a chemical explosion and returns nine days later with his body entirely inverted; literally turned inside out, as in a mirror image. In this case my own visualisation being a more gory one, my anatomic inversion would put the body's organs on the outside. Wells was illustrating a spatial fourth-dimensional rotation, a concept heavily inspired by the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, his Möbius strip being the 2 dimensional cousin of the Klein Bottle, a form that I have thought of as one the human body could easily be seen as being. All of which is my roundabout way of fusing scientific ideas with magical thinking. Contemporary superposition theory within quantum mechanics being my particular go to when trying to tap into possible science/magic conjunctions. As Ramsey Dukes suggests, it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that you just have to explore where and when actions may produce tangible results. In this case I'm tempted to see 'belief' as being a prime mover, especially as I have seen the placebo effect at work, alongside a continuing use of charm bracelets and contemporary votive practices. But perhaps even more than these, is the fact that contemporary politics seems to be locked into what I can only think of as the use of 'nam-shub' incantations, such as 'stop the boats' or 'fake news', short phrases that seem to magically shape reality. 

The Promise of arrival: 2016

'The Promise of Arrival', a work of mine from 2016, is a woven textile, an artefact that you can wrap around you to keep yourself warm, it is also when hung from a wall an image of a boat, one 

filled with migrants, attempting to cross a sea. The depiction of the sea echoing the shapes made by the textile when it begins to fold in use, the sea swell, another 'folding' by analogy, another gambit in a set of artworks that seek to unravel a plot to eliminate refugees and rename them terrorists. This is another 'nam-shub', one used to ensure that humans still have free will, this time as an antidote to the 'stop the boats' incantation, the spell that has been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and therefore bodies too. 

See also: 

Magic

Hybridity and permeability 

Chaos Magic

Why I'm making animist images

The blog as a research archive

At some point this blog will be put forward as evidence that I have both thought deeply about what it is I do and that my thinking has been made easily available to other people. 

I have several times during the writing of these blog posts referred to the making of maps. Whether these be of landscapes or the body, they are an important aspect of my thinking process. As long ago as 2017 I wrote about how map making could be a tool for enabling effective community ownership of both real and imagined events and I am still using thoughts about body mapping to realise imagined events and exploring how these imaginative maps might relate to more scientific visualisations. In my case I'm mapping my attempts at visualised feeling, off against more traditional mapping, that also includes various anatomical diagrams, from both western and eastern medical traditions. I. e. don't expect a direct link, as when you make a map of a town or landscape, where you can see an exact correspondence between what is mapped and the map. The relationship is felt, rather than understood logically. 

Neurobiological maps can visualise how bodily signals from, for example, respiration, pain, temperature, and heartbeat are continually conveyed and integrated through distributed neural pathways but there is no single, fixed “body map”, each approach produces a different image type, here are some of them:

Pain Pathways

The nervous system

Neural pathways of interoception 

Interoception embodied details

Pathways for interoceptive predictions in the brain

My drawings are another approach to an awareness that we have invisible feelings inside us and should never be understood as additional illustrations of neuroanatomy or as direct visual records of neural activity. They are better understood as aesthetic maps of interoceptive experience. Neurobiological systems continuously register and integrate signals from within the body, but conscious bodily feeling is not a simple read-out of those signals. It is shaped by attention, memory, emotion, expectation and the material circumstances of the moment. My drawings translate this changing, embodied field into visual relations: concentration and dispersal, pressure and release, opacity and permeability, rhythm and interruption. In this sense, the abstractions I make do not move away from bodily experience; they enable the felt dynamics of the body to be explored without reducing them to anatomical illustration.

This blog operates as a research archive as it documents the evolving concepts and material decisions behind the images. This post for instance is an attempt to make sense of mapping alongside the various images I have made of interoceptual experiences. These two images below can be seen as maps, the top one of the throat, just as a first breath is taken after constriction and the one below that of a feeling associated with the chest when it felt as if air could not be drawn in. 

Images made in response to feelings associated with breathing restrictions

We can think of the felt body as being shaped not only by current sensations, but also by attention, memory, expectation, emotion, and context. The experiential map of breathlessness, for instance, can include compression, blockage, turbulence, panic, emptiness, rhythm and an eventual release. The 'mapping' of this experience being something I have attempted to do several times in the past. My abstract drawings translate these changing qualities into visual equivalents, such as density, pressure, broken boundaries, blurred edges, colour changes, tonal variation, layered marks, dispersal, constriction, flow, repetition, or shifts between figure and ground. They do not directly depict the throat, lungs, nerves, or the insula; they make the felt organisation of an experience available for reflection, but they do in their evolution acknowledge more scientific anatomical representations, as well as the representations of other cultures, images such as medical and anatomical diagrams from Tibetan and Chinese medical textbooks and anatomical flap books being significant to my thinking process not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible.

I see my drawings as evolving visual models of the lived body, what phenomenology calls the body as experienced, rather than the body measured. My research continues to be focused on the visualisation of interoceptual experience which concerns the ongoing sensing and interpretation of the body’s internal condition, including respiration, pain, temperature, fatigue, hunger and cardiac activity. Neurobiological accounts describe this as a distributed process: bodily signals are conveyed through multiple pathways and integrated into changing representations of bodily condition. What interests me is that these representations are not fixed pictures of organs inside the brain, and neither are they detached from memory, attention, emotion, expectation or the surrounding environment, therefore the evolution of the images I am making can intersect with any single aspect of this or any combination, such as how the external landscape someone may have experienced may effect the way they feel about the visualisation of an emotional experience. Therefore in these images you find what I think of as 'ghosts' of other representations, traces of trees, alongside geological forms or vegetation; traces of images of lungs, throats, stomachs or ribs, all becoming available at one time or another, as I attempt to make interiority visible. Just as landscapes hold traces of former features, memories of other times, and maps of those landscapes may have indications of those fading features. 

Visualisation of an internal experience

My drawings should therefore not be understood as illustrations of neuroanatomy. They are artistic maps and images of the felt body: attempts to give visual form to the changing organisation of interoceptive experience. The relationship is analogical rather than anatomical. An image that looks a little like a broken rib may be used to evoke a certain recently felt pain, a twisted tube a stomach ache, which may in turn be accompanied by a dense, compressed area of mark-making that may evoke constriction or a broken line may evoke interruption; layered washes may evoke diffusion, uncertainty or overflow, figuration and non figuration being both used in the process of visualisation. Such formal choices do not identify a particular neural process or diagnose a bodily condition. They make available for reflection the felt dynamics through which a bodily state becomes meaningful.

An image made of emotions felt in the immediate aftermath of an operation 

This distinction between the measurable body and the lived body has been central to the development of the work. In my post “Drawing on Experience,” the distinction between Körper—the body as object—and Leib—the body as subject or lived experience—provides a useful conceptual hinge. Neurobiological maps belong primarily to the first register: they model physiological processes. My drawings work in the second: they explore what it is like to inhabit a body whose internal condition has become unusually insistent. The two registers are connected, but neither can be reduced to the other. 

Visualising stomachache

The movement between figuration and non figuration in my drawings is clarified in my article on Breathing. Early notebook drawings use ribs, throats, mouths and obstructions as provisional signs through which breathlessness can be articulated. Subsequent collages, watercolours and prints detach these forms from simple illustration. Ribs begin to overlap with tunnels, vaults and boats; remembered images, bodily sensation and material process become entangled. The later abstract images thus map a transition: not from bodily fact to fantasy, but from an immediate sensation to an expanded field of memory, metaphor and visual experimentation. The drawings record the work of how to visualise interoception, as much as they record the original sensation.

From 'Breathing'

My blog posts hopefully show that this is a sustained inquiry rather than an isolated response to illness. For instance my post “Drawing and healing traditions” questions the supposed neutrality of standardised pain images and argues for the importance of individual visual languages. Its most productive contribution is the recognition that an image can become a stable object to which a person may return, speak about and alter. This is consistent with the artwork’s role as a third object: it provides a shared focus without claiming that the artist, clinician or image possesses final knowledge of another person’s experience. This 'third object' however, also works as a type of externalised thought and as it finds symbolic connections with other things, it may also begin to operate as a fetish, a votive or a charm and thus become magical in its operation. 

“Drawing and healing” and “Anatomical flap books” extend the enquiry into a history of visual models of the body. Medical diagrams, Tibetan images, Chinese anatomical diagrams and flap books are significant here not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible. The flap is especially important. It introduces depth, concealment, revelation and temporal sequence: the inner body is not simply displayed but progressively encountered. My cut-outs and layered surfaces develop this principle into an artistic method for approaching bodily experience as partial, revisable and never fully transparent reflections on 'how it is' when experiencing the confusing signals that come from inside our bodies. 

Interoceptual portrait

“The inner and the outer” adds a further dimension, proposing that interoception, external perception and narrative continually inform one another. This helps explain why a visual language developed in relation to anxiety, pain or breathlessness may later reappear in work about migration or damaged cities. Such recurrence should not be presented as proof that a particular form has a universal bodily meaning. Rather, it establishes a personal and relational visual lexicon: a repertoire of forms whose meanings are tested, altered and situated through particular encounters.

From a series of images of broken cities

My continuing body of drawing, prints and ceramics holds within it expressions of bodily sensation, perception, memory, imagination and narrative, all linked through my own sensibility, without being forced into a single explanation, approach or style. It operates as a visual account of how the lived body becomes available to thought and how the visualisations made become further available as forms that can be used to make images of how I 'feel' about external experiences, such as the continuing trauma of wars or the stories of migrants told to me as I listen and draw. My current work with spinal injuries patients, being a locus around which new visual inventions are constantly having to be made, as people's internal feelings about their experiences are always unexpected and previously not visualised; therefore I have no existing models to work from and am forced to reinvent what it is I am visualising with each encounter; I am I suppose in this case always attempting to map the terra incognita of our invisible bodies. 

One area of the unknown that has recently raised its head has been the ability of the objects I make to become ensnared into the realm of magic; chaos magic in particular being of interest as it is a much more pragmatic approach to magical thinking and avoids arcane symbolism. I'm interested in this, just as I am in geometrical phycology or auras, the frayed edges of non scientific thinking being for myself threads that can be woven into the blanket of art, threads that are just as important an aspect of my research as to how art may affect people, as neurobiology or psychoanalysis. 

I am also very aware that I'm getting older, fingers become stiff, my knees ache and I get tired, another body of experiences to feed into the mix. I'm very lucky in that I can still work and that I'm employed as a research fellow. This eases my subconscious mind, in that the situation tells me that I need to keep working if I am to remain useful. Keeping this blog being one aspect of the work, something I have been doing regularly, at least once a week for over 10 years now. So hopefully as a archive it begins to have traction.

See also:

Drawing on experience

What is embodiment?

Why do we draw?

Why it matters

The problem with mountains and words

Somatic awareness: Texture and emotion

Wearable objects and curative things

Drawing as research

Chaos magic

For many years I have made fetishes. physical objects made to be inhabited or empowered by a spiritual force capable of offering protection or healing. These objects sit in my practice alongside votives and I view them both as objects of magical power. They operate using what I think of as sympathetic magic; a type of magical thinking based on the belief that an object or action can affect a person or thing through resemblance or a symbolic connection given to something via an associated narrative. 

For instance sometimes I make fetishes in the form of body parts.However they are also like animals, in this way a body part can have more agency and it feels as if it can take independent action.

Ceramic body part fetishes

At other times fetishes take the form of an animal. They are given an energy associated with the way the receiver of the fetish thinks about the animal depicted. A dog may be hard working, fierce, loyal or just dogged. A monkey might be mischievous, thoughtless or just swinging in the trees, the important issue being that the nature of the fetish will depend on what belief the participant has about the animal.  

Ceramic animal fetishes

I am fascinated by objects being able to affect invisible action at a distance. But just as interesting to me as sympathetic magic, is the contagious effect; contagious magic being the anthropological belief that things once in contact continue to act on each other, meaning a person or object can pass qualities, power, or harm to another through a physical association. My fetishes and votives working in this case as objects of touch. My handling of clay for instance is frozen as finger imprints into each object, which is why they are not smoothed out. I can put all of my feelings into my making and hope that those feelings can be passed on to others. 

Loneliness votive

I have made several loneliness votives. We all need a hug a one time or another and that is essentially what they consist of, a form hugging itself. They are small, designed to be kept in a pocket or held in the hand in times of stress. Their surfaces are of polished wax over rough fired clay, so that more handling enhances the effect. I put a lot of care into the final finish, so that whoever is given one, or asks for one, can intuitively feel that I'm passing on something that has had care put into it. The hug becomes a hug for them. It is passed on, both by its symbolic representation and by the 'care in the hand'. 

Occasionally as I'm working I get hints that what I'm sort of doing is reinventing a type of 'chaos magic' or 'magick' as it is often spelt within the realms of those who operate in this area. It was Grant Morrison whose graphic novels 'The Invisibles' I used to read avidly, that introduced me to chaos magick. This is a more modern approach to magic, one that acknowledges the old traditions, but which takes a more 'postmodern' approach to how to apply magical effects. It is more an attitude to practice than a set of rules or a belief system. Chaos magic explores the techniques of magical action, rather than setting up a particular sets of symbols to believe in, however many of the techniques used involve participants in engaging with belief systems. There being no absolute truth, therefore a magic practitioner can theoretically do anything in order to achieve a result. However at its core is a belief in belief, a similar reasoning also underlying why my votive objects can affect both physical and mental change. 

One definition of chaos is, 'The formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos.' The apparent order of things, a chaos magician might argue, is merely an arbitrary structure that we perceive. This formless state of matter, being a primal force from which is built magical energies. A chaos magician has the ability to change beliefs and thinking paradigms whenever a different approach is needed. I. e. they are accustomed to be able to look at and see their reality from different points of view. To the chaos magician, beliefs are choices, but belief is the tool that empowers the magic. I suppose it was this issue that drew me to exploring chaos magic as a system of thinking, as it allowed me to embrace a number of varying systems at the same time and to embed them all into my thought process. Hence my interest in outdated beliefs and para-scientific ideas such as Rayonism, Geometrical Psychology, etheric doubles, subtle bodies and similar ideas. 

At the centre of these belief systems is a concept of materialising thought, whether these thoughts are constructed as flat images or objects, what is interesting is that ideas that were in someone's head are now manifest as tangible things. Ceramic objects, because they are invested with clear memories of my hands at work, are often used by myself as fetishes and I have attempted many times to conjure up the associated energies that need to be embedded within fetish type objects. As you make them, you need to believe that you are investing them with some sort of energy or psychic force, something that is transmitted through the hand/eye/brain relationship and as you bring them into a public arena, you need to be able to communicate that concept to others. Which is why stories and narratives are often needed to bolster the visual affect of these objects. 

My fetish store

Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic produced a diagram to explain how magic sat alongside art, science and religion as a way of explaining or controlling human behaviour. 

I shall in a future post use Ramsey Duke's as a guide as to how magic can be thought of as a way to explain how an art practice can be also in some ways magic too and I have a bit more to say about how an artwork as fetish might operate. 

See also:

Magic

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Magic in art Slideshow

Benjamin Betts and Geometrical Psychology

Eye Music Includes link to 'Thought Forms' by Besant and Leadbeater

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The iconography of the invisible

The active cycle of breathing techniques A paper whereby I try to visualise the invisible sensations that pain and emotional trauma instil within us. A first step towards the construction of a form of ‘illusory enactment’.

Why I'm making Animist images