Body cartography

Human embryonic development

I have been looking at the work of the body cartography project. This is something that has been underway for some time but I have only just discovered it. Perhaps this is because I have only recently begun to look more closely at how dancers work, however as artists of the body, they are finely tuned to somatic experiences. Body maps have interested me for a while, and the body cartography project bases its focus on the developing of experiential tools that are derived from somatics, (sensation-based movement practices), dance and choreography. The background scientific research they have done, because they are focused on movement and change rather than static facts, is focused upon embryology; the branch of animal biology that studies the prenatal development of gametes, fertilisation as well as the development of embryos and fetuses. 

Carla Bottiglieri, a project researcher for the body cartography project, has stated;

"With embryology, anatomy ceases being the static, achieved geography of structures – a stillness that is primarily borrowed from the cadaveric inertia of the dissected body – and reveals what moved and still moves our seemingly silent interiors. Learning through embodiment may start from a choreographic-like mind, the one that takes images as maps, maps as diagrams, and everything as scores. In the case of embryology, the term score seems almost to be closer to music than to dance, and in fact lines and directions describing the all too busy movement of the forming embryo, in order to be “correctly” read, need kinematics being paralleled with dynamics: a play of intensities, rhythms, simultaneous events, different speed rates."

This statement immediately drew my attention, because I have for a while been working to develop a way of making images about interoceptual experiences that are not reliant upon static anatomy illustrations from medical textbooks, or some sort of fixed map that tries to pin down where things occur. I have been looking for various ways to open up my own and others awareness of the body's kinetic inner perception of its own sensations, which hopefully might bring about a more nuanced sense of our presence in the world and the experience of being.

Embryology Sections

Tree with root system

The study of embryology also includes an awareness of the evolutionary history of the human body and the bodies and forms of other living creatures. For instance our cranial bones are developed in the mesenchymal tissue surrounding the head end of the notochord; a process that begins in the foetus by the end of the first month of pregnancy. Most of the cranial vault and a portion of the base of the skull arise as membranous bone. However there are two types of evolutionary origins or paths that are operating here and they occur simultaneously and complementary with each other in the formation of the completed cranium. We are a type of primate, and the development of the primate skull consists of neural and visceral (branchial) components. The neural portion consists of the brain case and the capsular enclosure of the special sense organs. The visceral portion is derived from the embryonic counterparts of the branchial arches, which, in fishes and tailed amphibia, support the oral and pharyngeal regions. These visceral components function in respiration and mastication. The formation of the primate palate being an innovation which permits infants to suck and the adult to chew while respiration continues. The neural and visceral components of the branchial arches include Branchial motor neurons that are located in the brainstem and which supply with nerves the muscles formed by the branchial arches. The branchial arches are a series of six paired arches that form in the head and neck of an embryo during the fourth week of gestation. The arches are made up of four tissue components: cartilage, aortic arch artery, nerve, and muscle and they will eventually develop into the face, neck, and oropharynx (soft pallet, tonsils, and part of the tongue).

Fetal skull

So why is this so important? The structure of the primate palate means we can't breathe and eat at the same time, but we can coordinate breathing and swallowing to allow for eating. The pharynx is the shared route for both functions, but it's used differently for each activity. When breathing, the pharynx dilates to keep the airway open, but when swallowing, it constricts to push food down the oesophagus. When at rest, the epiglottis is upright and allows air to pass into the lungs, but when swallowing, the epiglottis folds backward to cover the larynx's entrance, preventing food and liquid from entering the lungs. Swallowing is therefore a complex process that involves coordinating more than 26 muscles and 6 nerves. When swallowing, breathing temporarily stops, and becomes more irregular and this can lead to problems, some of which I have had to face myself at times. As part of my own process of self awareness, I have to make sure I am calm and relaxed when eating, if not I can easily find myself with muscle tension in the throat, which leads to a difficulty in swallowing due to a globus sensation (a persistent but painless feeling of having something stuck in your throat when there is nothing there). that I can experience because of anxiety. The complex interconnection of interoceptual experience, (somatic feelings) and the autonomic nervous system that mediates unconscious activities, is hard for me to understand and yet I have begun to think that it is very important. So for myself, my own body map has one of its focal points around the throat, and since I have had problems with plantar fasciitis, another is the base of my left foot.

Trying to visualise plantar fasciitis

By owning some sort of visualisation of these sensations, I can help myself move on and not be stopped in my tracks by them, as I have literally been in the past. I.e. I can to some extent try to adjust my mental state in order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis'. (The process of keeping your body in balance by noticing changes and then acting upon them to regulate your systems). There are many ways to track your environment and spot any changes, some are very obvious, such as seeing something dangerous in the distance, or hearing a loud noise coming closer and then you can act appropriately, but an awareness of other more subtle changes can be more intuitive, and they may be 'felt' sensations, or beliefs, which are harder to pin down, but they are still perceived experiences. We have a wide range of equipment that extends our body's perceptual abilities, such as microphones, telescopes, microscopes and radar, all of which can be used to predict external changes, but as yet we have few mechanisms that can measure internal change and it is the complex arena of our inner lives that fascinates me and that I have been trying to visualise.

Anatomical diagram of the throat

Visualisation of interoceptual awareness of swallowing air

However, one of the most complex issues facing embodied awareness is the status of the other creatures that inhabit and make up what I think of as my body. As far back as 1991 Lynn Margulis had introduced the idea of the holobiont, a term used to describe a host organism and the microorganisms that live on or within it, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The holobiont body, is a body, like our own, where over 50% of the cells are microbial symbionts that are integrated into the physiological, anatomical, developmental, and immunological processes of the body. Therefore the actualisation of the body only occurs through the support of teams of species and in consequence an idea like 'immunity' can be thought of as a holobiont function, wherein microbes and zygote-derived cells cooperate for mutual defence. The zygote cell undergoes cleavage, or cell division and when it does, the new cells are called blastomeres, which are smaller cells that form a compact mass called the morula, which is the solid ball of cells that form the early stages of embryonic development in mammals. There is an elliptic visual connection here in that the word "morula" comes from the Latin word morus, which means mulberry, fruits that do indeed look very like the blastomeres and this year our mulberry tree has fruited abundantly for the first time. As Shakespeare knew, you don't pick mulberries as they will break up in your hands, you put sheets down under the tree and shake it, then collect all the fruits that have fallen.

Now humble as the ripest mulberry

That will not hold the handling.

                                        Coriolanus

Mulberry

A: The morula.  B: A cross section of a blastula

If we die, all the creatures that live on and within us die too or have to move elsewhere, just as if and when the Earth dies, all the creatures that live on and within it will die too. In order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis', an environment of co-habitation needs to be fostered, and this needs to be about mutual intra species processes of symbiosis, something that can be suggested by the processes of the visualisation of feelings, even if it cant be depicted from observation. The flow of movement that suggests the processes at work here is what the body cartography project is most interested in and it points out that the body is in its peak flow mode during the first few weeks of its life. Many of the signals that are sent out by an organising fetal entity are intra-species, a microbial life is being ushered in just as much as a mammalian one. The more we understand this, the less I would hope that we are bothered that some mammals are darker in skin tone than others.

The body cartography project uses dance as a form of embodied learning and communication. I posted recently on Katia Heitmann's work, whereby a dancer will observe others and then attempt to mimic their body movements as a form of archiving. The body cartography project is similar, in that a dancer wants 'to pay attention to and to move with things that are invisible yet also and therefore, invisible in the sense that you’re not seeing the same body structure and also invisible in the sense that things that are very patterned or repeated or are not very apparent sometimes, forgotten, like the sensation of wearing your clothes'...

Taken from a record of a conversation during the Fluid Spaces Event: Teknisk Museum, Oslo in 2022.

It seems to me that the dancer was searching for a way of communicating things that are on the edge of our awareness, in a similar way to how I am searching for a way of making myself and others aware of some sort of interconnected flow of energies, a flow that I could hopefully visualise in either drawing or ceramics.

From a developing animation

This way of thinking is not new, and if you have been reading my posts over the last few years, you will have seen that I am fascinated by the various theories that emerged during the 19th century as ways to explain what was going on in the world. The emergence around 1800 of the science of embryology was at the time a theory based on the epistemology of rhythm. At the time the concept of rhythm was crucial to many fields of knowledge, including the study of life and living processes. This led to an understanding of the living world in terms of rhythmic patterns, rhythmic movement and of course rhythmic representations, and it echoed Schlegel’s statement that, “All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.” The Romantic ideal was that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn’t be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone and this argument is something that I still have a great deal of faith in.

A link to more embryology images here

The illustration that describes the transition of a dot, as in drawing A, its extension and growth through to a recognisable form at point G, is as much poetry as science. At no point is a body ever either as it is represented at B or at G or at any other point, all the images above are figments of the imagination of an artist. 

B and G

Perhaps what I'm really interested in is the idea of 'becoming'. Becoming is a process that eludes observation and is hard to represent, which is why it is interesting to myself as an artist. Things that are directly analysable or measurable can reasonably easily be depicted, but there is a hard cognitive and perceptual struggle to be had, if we are to visualise processes that are continuous and often invisible and felt with senses other than the visual. This it seems to me is a worthwhile task, and it keeps driving me on to make the images I do and to believe that at some point these images might actually become useful.  

References:

Richards, R.J. (2010) The romantic conception of life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe. University of Chicago Press.

Wellmann, J. (2017) The form of becoming: embryology and the epistemology of rhythm, 1760–1830. Princeton University Press.

Wellmann, J. (2021). History of Embryology: Visualizations Through Series and Animation. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_22-1

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Katja Heitmann and embodied learning.

Eco awareness and OOO

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc's theory of iconography,

Benjamin Brett's idea of geometric psychology,

Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms,

Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright's Synchromism movement,

Edwin Babbitt's 'chromo-mentalism',

What it is to be human?

Lavinia Fontana, “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” (c. 1595), oil on canvas

A hereditary condition known as generalised hypertrichosis terminalis, leads to a covering of fur over most of the body. If a human being has this, it usually triggers a reaction in others that suggests that in some way the person has regressed into being an animal. It is though of no harm to the person that has it and in certain cases, can be a help, as the extra hair still does the job that it was genetically evolved to do in the first place, which is mainly to keep an animal warm and to protect sensitive skin from the sun's rays.

Hair is something most of us have and only in rare cases is someone totally hairless. Like all hairy animals our hair takes certain directions over the body.

Human: Hair direction: Front and back

Dog: Hair direction

The fact that other hairy animals also have directional hair, is something we rarely think of as a common denominator but it is for my drawing self, interesting to think about hair direction as an example of visual energy moving around the body.

The visualisation of imagined interoceptual awareness of fur sensations

Thinking about commonality can also be an entry into animist thinking; for instance you might try to imagine what it would be like to live within a fur clad body. Body hair also provides tactile sensory input by transferring hair movement and vibration via the hair's shaft to sensory nerves within the skin. Therefore we can like other animals, extend our sense of touch beyond the surface of the skin, into the space surrounding us, by using hair to detect air currents, the presence of insects or the close proximity of objects. However the resultant perceptual stimulus and/or interoceptual feelings engendered, are rarely picked out as being important to us. But for many animals this group of senses is vital and being more aware of how they operate, might enable us to have more empathy with other creatures.
The hairs of the skin not only function to prevent heat loss but also have important sensory functions. Recent work has now established that each hair of the skin has one or more of three types of mechanoreceptor ending. Each of these three mechanoreceptor types can detect distinctive information about skin touch, which is relayed to specific brain locations in a somatotopic fashion. (Somatotopy is the precise mapping of body parts to specific areas of the brain.) My interest in interoception, has meant that I have also tried to imaginatively visualise the feeling in the body/brain of a passage of air over hairy skin and how that in itself can become another body part. Feelings, I strongly believe, can be concretised as images. The flowing, twisting sensations in the orange/black image above being my imaginative immersion into what it might feel like to be a sensing hirsute animal. 

Our intellectual history reflects the constructing of an ever widening distance between ourselves and our animal nature, something that we have recently had to question. The more we mentally separated ourselves from nature, the less we were concerned with having any sort of empathy with the natural world. Now that we are more aware of an 'embodied' mind, the recognition that the mind is in fact shaped by the body and is inseparable from it, the more we are also becoming aware that the body is itself shaped by and inseparable from the environment it inhabits. The mental separation of ourselves from nature, has historically led to a using of the world's resources, as if we had no moral responsibility for them. We were able to 'other' not only animals but any humans who did not look like or act like 'us' and as we did so, we also used these other humans as if they were animals or chattel. In the past we set up all sorts of intellectual constructs to help with this, to justify our ability to use anything to further our own ends.

Slave traders were enabled by church leaders who perversely interpreted the Bible in such a way that slavery could be understood as guiding other humans out of the darkness of their mistaken ways and into Christian salvation. The separation was such that other humans were even stuffed and displayed in a similar way to animals. Until recently for 40 pesetas you could still buy a postcard of a stuffed human.

I wonder how the taxidermist thought of the task at hand when asked to work on preserving this 'specimen'? How did those theories of "scientific racism", such as the classification of people according to intellectual inferiority or superiority on the basis of skull measurements, affect the way that the taxidermist approached this task? Or perhaps the task was made easier because the taxidermist was Christian and he believed that his subject was a son of Ham? This idea had persisted for several hundred years, back in the 16th century, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote that Africans were enslaved “because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon [Ham]… that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world”.

The Bible also of course had other things to say about this;

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

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Genesis 26 to 29

So we look like God, but who is the we? We are God faced. But what if God looked more like Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew? What if the directional pattern of our hair was actually a sign from God? As an atheist my question is why is my hair directional, and what does this tell me about myself? It tells me that evolution is always ongoing and that humans are what they are for a brief period of time, the genetics of life ensuring there is always a better fitted form to the various life niches that are always opening out and that perhaps in the future we will need more hair to protect us from the sun's rays, and if so, future people might be very hairy.

The condition hypertrichosis terminalis is a genetic one and can be therefore passed on. 300 years after the time of Antonietta Gonzalez, Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew was born with the same condition. Like Antonietta Gonzalez before him, he is nearly always presented in images clothed in the best raiments of the time. No one tries for instance to make him get down on all fours and show his naked body. The clash between smart clothing and an abnormally hairy face, seeming to tell us more about the nature of one of the processes of civilisation. We, the normal people, dress in a certain way, a way that signals we are 'normal'. Outward appearance, grooming, it is suggested, reflecting something about the state of the inner mind.

“Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”

Perhaps we need a distorted mirror to work out what we really look like, or what we naturally look like. In the late 19th century Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew toured the sideshows of Europe with his father, the ‘Wild Man from the Kostroma Forest’ and was then at the age of 16 taken to the USA by P. T. Barnum, where he toured under the name of “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”. He was told to make dog noises for the various audiences who came to see him, even though he could in fact speak three languages, and was like his father simply a man who had hypertrichosis, but also like his father he would have to live life as an outsider.

From: https://mybillie.com/

Hair is also gendered, men can easily become hirsute but women, when they have hair, are often expected to shave. Billie, a New York-based subscription service sells “razors built for womankind” and they have initiated 'Project Body Hair', which is 'A CELEBRATION OF FEMALE BODY HAIR…WHEREVER IT IS OR ISN’T.' On their website they state, "For the past 100 years, women’s razor brands haven’t acknowledged female body hair. Commercials show women "shaving" perfectly smooth, airbrushed legs. Strange, huh? But everyone has short stubble, long strands, or something in between. What you do with yours is up to you - grow it, get rid of it, or comb it. It's your hair, after all." A clear recognition that cultural norms are yet again shifting. Perhaps its becoming ok for a woman to be hairy. The popularity of werewolf teen movies, suggests that within popular culture the werewolf look is becoming socially acceptable.

Werewolf Girl by Terminotaur

As I looked into what was going on in terms of contemporary culture, I discovered that there was now such a thing as a 'furry artist', defined as 'a person who creates artistic works with the furry fandom in mind as the target audience, or who creates anthropomorphic art of interest to the fandom.' I was not really as aware as I should have been of how culture was changing. It is now totally acceptable to dress up as a dog and go out in public.

A typical image taken from a furry fandom website

A shaman is supposed to have the ability to speak with animals, and some of them have a belief that they can shapeshift into animal forms by using hallucinogens or a combination of dancing, drumming, and singing and I can see a role for a similar figure within contemporary culture. Clare Milledge in her doctorate thesis points out that the role of both the artist and shaman has 'always been to stand between two worlds: that of the visible and the invisible.' and that we 'entrust the artist to go forth into the realm of the invisible and return with a gift: the invisible transformed into the visible'.
As I try to chase down a role for an artist within our present society, there are aspects of shamanism that do seem to ring true, but perhaps acting more like an artist working as a mediator between things rather than as a priest showing the way. Mediation requires high levels of empathy, a thought which takes me back to that portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez.

The fact that Lavinia Fontana was a woman artist at a time when the profession was seen as male only, must have influenced the way that the Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez was thought about. Both were women outsiders, both could demonstrate abilities equal to the men that surrounded them, but as the men had set out the patriarchal rules of the game, neither of them would ever really be accepted as equals. Antonietta Gonzalez is depicted as someone, who is indeed a someone. There is a recognition of a thinking mind in her direct stare and presentation of a written text that states something important about her. In many ways Lavinia Fontana's image is much more modern than the image of the Werewolf Girl. Antonietta Gonzalez is presented to us as a complex human being, one that like all of us is conflicted and has to survive the fact that other people don't know what is going on in your mind, no matter how hard you try to explain yourself. It is amazing when you realise that someone else has a real empathy with yourself, and I suspect those two women had seen something in each other that really chimed. Looking at a preparatory sketch, helps us to see that the empathy with the subject was not just a one off accident, as there is a similar feeling of total acceptance of Antonietta Gonzalez as a young woman and a clear recognition of the human being behind the hair,

Lavinia Fontana: Preparatory sketch for the Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez 1594-95 Red and black pencil, brown ink on paper, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York

So how we can build on empathy as a way into being more at one with the world? I have recently been talking to someone about 'modes' of behaviour. Certain people look for particular patterns in life and others see different ones and both act accordingly. Some people realise this and accept the difference, whilst others think that their own mode is the right one and judge other people by how far they fail to operate in a similar mode to themselves. This causes a lot of confusion. Open this out and its easy to see how hard it is to have empathy with a dog or a bat or a tree or a mountain, all entities that we have to coexist alongside, but unless we really work hard, we may well fail to work in harmony with the world that we coexist with.

Trying to visualise my way into this set of thoughts, I made a drawing of myself wearing the white coat of the scientist, (its actually the white coat of the ceramicist, but who's to know?) and then added hair. Over the years I've had to come to terms with going bald, so it was a fascinating reversal. I'm nowhere as skilled as Lavinia Fontana in this sort of image making, but it was an interesting thing to do none the less. Fur is for most mammals not just a heat regulator, it is also a complex mass of sensors that attunes an animal to a constant awareness of its own speed of movement through space, the proximity of other objects that disturb the air around them, as well as changes in the weather. Hair helps attune animals to the world.

Feet and hands are still feet and hands when hairy

The popular press occasionally dips its toes into this area and when it does it often focuses on the cultural myth of the werewolf. Hypertrichosis terminalis is often called the 'werewolf syndrome'. Very quickly interest will turn to Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, and a historical reminder of his career will be given. I was fascinated to see in one article an illustration of a poster advertising the appearance of Jo-Jo and his father at the Middlesex Music hall in England. They were however identified as Kostroma People from the forests of central Russia, a far more interesting description than P. T. Barnam's redefinition. 'Kostroma People' suggests that in Middlesex at least Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew and his father were regarded as 'people' and not animals.

Another notorious figure with generalised hypertrichosis terminalis who had to endure the sideshow culture of the 19th century was Julia Pastrana. At the time she was billed as “the ugliest woman in the world,” or “the bear woman.” She was described as the link between mankind and the orangutang and was therefore also known as “the ape woman.”

Julia Pastrana

Victorian 'scientists' claimed that Julia Pastrana was a half-human, half ape hybrid. She was always advertised as half-animal, with many people regarding her as a type of ape. In reality she spoke several languages and by all accounts was an intelligent woman with refined tastes.

Julia Pastrana: The bearded lady, embalmed. Wood engraving

The cruel culture of spectacle was often all those who physically didn’t conform to an arbitrary ideal of beauty could expect. Julia Pastrana is on her death in childbirth, finally mounted and embalmed and put into a display that also included her dead baby, who had inherited the gene that carried generalised hypertrichosis terminalis. Which is why it is so fascinating to find that Lavinia Fontana's “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” is painted without a hint of the sideshow. On the contrary, Antonietta appears inquisitive, happy, self-assured and gazes back, standing her ground, asking us, who are we to question her?

What it is to be human is constantly being redefined, but my personal definition is one that doesn't privilege human beings above other beings, we are just something that is conscious of being and in being so, we are aware of being alive.

References
Agramunt, J., Parke, B., Mena, S., Ubels, V., Jimenez, F., Williams, G., Rhodes, A.D., Limbu, S., Hexter, M., Knight, L. and Hashemi, P., (2023) Mechanical stimulation of human hair follicle outer root sheath cultures activates adjacent sensory neurons. Science Advances, 9(43).

Garland-Thomson, R., 2017. Julia Pastrana, the “extraordinary lady”. Alter, 11(1), pp.35-49.

Milledge, C. (2012) The Artist-Shaman and the" Gift of Sight: Sydney College of the Arts: PhD thesis Accessed from: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9452

See also:

Why draw animals

Invisible worlds

What is a portrait

Seeing as drawing: Drawing as seeing

The ecstatic journey

As I go back to thinking about magic, I have also been trying to work with what I'm thinking of as the poetics of healing. This is another sort of shamanistic idea, but one informed by Bachelard's 'The Poetics of Space'. At the centre of the idea is the votive, whereby an internal concern, be this a way of thinking, an emotion, a desire or a pain, is externalised and located within an object that has been specifically made to hold the idea in a material form.
The process of coming to terms with these more transformative approaches to art making can be thought of as an ecstatic journey. One where you need to have some sort of belief that what can be achieved goes beyond the aesthetics of art and begins to impinge on the psychic transformations normally associated with religious practices.
A belief that all is connected lies at the root of this approach, which can also mean that life gets very convoluted unless some sort of overall view is maintained. For instance, I am thinking about how important small things in the natural world are to the overall forming of reality, so one thing I'm doing is to try to spend more time in the garden, and as I do so I get involved with a story. I have become very aware that without earthworms we would have no soil. If soils consisted entirely of clay and silt particles, they would be too dense and airless for plants to grow in. The roots of plants could neither penetrate the soil nor breathe in it. It is crucial for plant growth that the individual mineral particles in the soil clump together into aggregates, which, because they are more irregular in size and shape than the individual mineral particles, have more spaces between them; spaces through which air, water and plant roots can pass. The aggregate structure of soil also stabilises it and makes it resistant to erosion. If the soil has no structure, it can very easily be washed away by rain or wind. It is organic matter that sticks the mineral particles together to make the aggregates and the actions of worms facilitates this. This story told by the agricultural science community is a powerful one and it helps us to see how worms glue the soil together. Slugs are also doing good stuff. They feed on and process garden debris, including fungi and rotting vegetation. They are a key player in the decomposition process and help to recycle and circulate nutrients into and through the soil, through burrowing, dropping their faeces, and eventually as their own dead bodies decompose, they operate as organic fertiliser pellets. So yes these stories are very important, so how can I make use of them? First of all I attempted to make drawings of worms. This was an attempt to raise their profile, my thought being that on seeing a drawing of a worm, a person would think that if someone was bothered to make images of the humble worm, there must be a reason behind their decision.

I found it hard to make images from drawing worms and slugs and realised why in the past I had drawn snails. Snails carry with them a powerful formal device in the form of their shells and give you an entry into a visual language straight away. The spiral is a very clear form and I've used it several times in the past. The segmented worm is a particularly difficult creature to make into a poetically convincing image but the attempt was made and someone may have taken an interest.

Homage to Beatrix Potter

Slugs belong to the mollusk family which also includes squid, octopi, snails, clams, and oysters; they sit in my mind alongside the arthropods, which include insects, spiders, mites, crabs and scorpions. Arthropods are bilaterally symmetrical, triploblastic, metamerically segmented animals that have a coelom (the fluid-filled body cavity of an animal that contains the internal organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys). Their body is covered externally in a chitinous exoskeleton which moults periodically and their appendages are joined.

Worms (earthworms, leeches, marine worms, etc.) are segmented, and belong to the Phylum Annelida; (from the Latin root word annelus meaning ring). The body of an annelid is divided into repeating sections, with many internal organs repeated in each segment. All of these creatures could be regarded as ancestors of mammals and each one at some point emerged from the sea. The fluid-filled body cavity that contains the internal organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys, being a particularly potent connection, a likeness that was beginning to worm its way into my own visual poetry.

Dreams of the fluid-filled body cavity

Inner body double

I had also been considering the anthropomorphic as a way towards animist thinking, hence my homage to Beatrix Potter, on the other hand I have, as I have been reflecting on these things, tried to find forms that I can use either as fetishes or as analogies. For instance a heart pain, as I pointed out in my last post, was read by someone as an attack by some sort of invisible inside the body insect/creature. When I showed them my visualisations of this they were more convinced that it was more like the sting of a scorpion than an insect.

Crab/scorpion fetishes 

Looking back at the scorpion/crab forms I had made in response to conversations about pain and how it can attack you unawares, I began wondering around whether or not my votive work could be extended in some way by using these 'painful objects'. This took me back to thinking about pain and the depiction of body maps from imagination.

The imaginary inside of the body began with images made in relation to interoceptual experiences, but I now wanted to incorporate my feelings about non mammalian creatures. Their abundance suggesting that as we cause more and more problems because of our desecrating of the planet, it will be 'lower' organisms that will need to clean up after us.

Inner visions

One series of drawings began to link my thoughts of how to visualise an inside 'thought form' with the idea of plant growth. Another 'hybrid' image resulted. An easy step then to other variations, such as a visualisation of what a fusion between an imaginary internal form and a fetish arthropod external form might look like.

So how does all this relate to the process of coming to terms with transformative approaches to art making, and the ecstatic journey? What has this got to do with psychic transformations normally associated with religious practices?
If I go back to my parents use of 'tranculments', those ornaments kept around the house when I was a boy, I can see clearly now how they were used to externalise thoughts. In my post on 'Thingamajigs' I pointed out that those ornaments were full of psychic energy and that they gave some sort of protection from the reality of life. I also pointed out that originally horse brasses had been used as charms or amulets to ward off evil and to bring good luck. I.e. we use purposely crafted objects to effect psychic transformations.
I have had very useful feedback from people who have now lived with my loneliness votives for a while.

Loneliness votive

They are small ceramic objects designed to be held in the hand, especially if and when you are feeling lonely. People do say that they work and that they keep them about their person, or sit them on a handy spot in the house. They are about feeling and touch and are designed to represent a simple hug. I call them votives because they are objects offered in fulfilment of a promise. In this case two promises. One on my part to make something that I think will help with the wellbeing of someone and the other a promise made by the recipient that they will trust in the exchange and be open to the possibilities that the object offers.
In a post on drawing and spirituality , I referred to the concept of transubstantiation, at its clearest and most often used when the wafer and wine are taken during Mass and these are ‘transformed’ into the body and blood of Christ. The physical in effect becomes spiritual, but only because the people involved, both priest and congregation, have trust and belief in the process. The shaman is a figure that appears in many societies and who still plays a central role in some people's lives, such as the Inuit people. Shamans operate with a belief that every living thing has a “soul” or life-force which exists independently of its physical form. They have often been cited by people as a model for certain art practices such as those undertaken by Joseph Beuys, but there is another role slightly different in the way it operates that was written about by Clare Milledge (2012), that offers the viewer a shamanistic vision but then makes sure they are aware that this is an artifice, a construction, that they need to take part in as much as the artist. I.e. it is a conversation and a co-construction. Milledge points out that there are several artists working in this way including Marcus Coates, Steinar Haga Kristensen, Jonathan Meese, Paul Thek, Justene Williams and herself; artists who have designed practices that return to the viewer the power that we often think of as invested in the artist, in effect giving to others the “gift of sight.” I like the idea of a practice that emerges from a conversation, especially one that helps both participants come to a better understanding of themselves and their relationship with the world around them. Another issue is that, as is pointed out in the introduction to the book 'Shamanhood and Art', (2014, p. 8), "a shaman should not be confused with a priest; he or she is an active practitioner and not a passive receiver of mystical messages..." As an 'active practitioner', I see myself as someone involved with the imaginative transformation of materials into carriers of ideas.

The body as landscape cross section

References

Djaltchinova-Malec, E.E. and Hoppal, M., (2014) Shamanhood and art. Budapest: Akademai Kiado, Warsaw: Polish Institute of World Art Studies.

Milledge, C. (2012) The Artist-Shaman and the" Gift of Sight: Sydney College of the Arts: PhD thesis Accessed from: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9452

See also:

Magic

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Thoughts on a collaborative practice

Magic

Title slide of the Magic in Art lecture

I am not teaching any more, but when I was, one of the lectures I gave was on magic and art. I proposed that magic was at the core of the process we now call art and that the boundary between the real and the unreal is what is played with in both the performance of magic and art. As key examples I used images from ancient Egypt, Rome, India and Greece, and suggested that often there was no distinction between art and magic. 

What I wanted to do was to question the passivity of objects and to highlight how objects affect our experience of perception and effect change in our minds and bodies. Hopefully this way of thinking would lead to the construction of a different, more animist relationship with objects. 

A few slides from the presentation

When discussing theatrical props in relation to stage magic, Robinson argues that there is a process of transformation occurring as the trick is enacted; the ‘illusory enactment’ (Robinson, 2014, p. 136). I see this as being very similar to the need for rituals in the energising of the inanimate, and the making of magical reality. When I make votives for people, I also need to develop a private ritual for when the votive is 'put into operation' or made 'live'. This might seem to be illusionary but it is as 'real' an experience as any other. This is the driving force behind ritual objects. But they must all have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning. This is often called the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. In my own work this might be rather obtuse or hard to see, but I can track the connection, and this gives it, if only to myself, the object's spiritual energy.

For instance recent images that are like crabs, scorpions or insects, began with someone talking to me about a somatic experience of pain that felt like they were being stung on their insides. In my mind I saw the shape of this 'stinger', which was initially like a scorpion and drew an image for the person involved of a man riding a scorpion, like a horse; in effect getting on top of the pain, being in control of it. This became a print and as I thought about this 'creature' from the insides, it began to have offspring, other pain inflicting creatures, such as crabs that could pinch and snip you, or insects that could sting. We tend to believe that these sorts of creatures have no sentience, so in our minds they do not themselves feel pain, but this is probably myth too and they probably do feel pain. 

Getting on top of the pain

Visualising a somatic experience of pain that felt like being stung on the inside

By bringing humans and invertebrates together in a visual narrative, it gives honorific value to both and some sort of equality as agents, even if the scorpion was initially only an analogy in someone's mind. 

Eventually the drawings engendered solid ritualistic objects, as these seem to have more potency. Objects offer possibilities of actual 'exchange', they externalise ideas, and as they do they make them 'real'. In his paper, 'Becoming Real: The Fluidity of Objects in Magic', Fan-chen Huang explains how boundaries between the real and the imaginary become unpicked during the enactment of magic acts. He states, 'Since time immemorial, magic has been an art that, by manipulating human perception and simulating the real, alternates the passivity of objects and disturbs the stable relationship between man and things. As magic creates a real that surpasses the realm of common knowledge and becomes more real than the real, our recognition of objects undergoes a distortion.'  He goes on to state that '...objects seem to be able to deviate from their normal course of thing-for-us in magical illusions, shattering our affirmation of perception and the scientific absolute.' 

This unpicking of the 'scientific absolute' is a useful thought as far as I am concerned, as I'm always trying to find a place for my practice as an artist, and I sometimes need to work in those gaps between a logical, supposedly 'objective' view of the world and a scientific understanding of things. There still seems to myself something missing, whether this is 'spirit', the vital spark of life, Bergson's élan vital, invisible energy forces, that something or whatever it is that I can never quite touch or put my finger on, but which I intuitively feel is there. 

I was in the Ashmolean museum recently making drawings of objects that made sense to me in relation to where I am in my own work, and one vitrine related to work from an ancient Egyptian civilisation going back to the Palaeolithic period, was full of significant objects. It was as if they could still talk to me, especially as I was already making images of scorpions and the ones in the vitrine were used in magical rituals.

From sketchbook pages drawn in the Ashmolian Museum

On returning to Leeds I went back into image making and began looking for that form that was both magical and real. 

Drawing for ceramics

Of course I then had to do some research into ancient Egyptian culture and realised once again how powerfully these themes had already been dealt with, but instead of being put off, I am even more fascinated by the possibilities this approach to image making offers. 

Serket

Serket, “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”

In ancient Egypt images, like the one above that was used as part of a spell to protect you from stepping on a scorpion, were used to put into effect sympathetic magic. Scorpions were also often pictured without stings or claws or they had knives stuck in them, to magically render then harmless. The protective scorpion goddess Selket used to guard coffins of the dead, and in order to effect this, statuettes of scorpions were often pierced, so that they could be be mounted on poles that had been pushed into the ground. As I read about this I was reminded of the work I made for the Patching Sculpture trail in Nottingham, where I had done something similar, this time using flower forms as a memorial to those drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they tried to get to safety in Europe.

From the YSG Patching exhibition: Breaking Ground

The objects I'm thinking about are only just emerging, several are waiting to be fired, others waiting to be glazed and I've as yet to come up with the right way to position them on poles and how to do this both indoors and outdoors, but I shall get there.

In the meantime I have a couple already made.

Crab/scorpions

Magic fetishes emerging

References:

Robinson, A. (2014). All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation. In M. Schweitzer & J. Zerdy (Eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (pp. 135–148). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lynne U. Sneddon (2015) Pain in aquatic animals Journal of Experimental Biology Volume 218 Issue 7 April p. 967–976.

See also:

The evolution of an idea A post that shows in more detail how I evolve a sculptural idea 

The iconography of the invisible 

Drawing feet

Why I'm making animist images

Magic Slideshow