The feeling of a lack of circulation in the foot
Over time I have slowly begun to realise that the embodied feelings that I have been trying to visualise are tightly woven into the emotions, thoughts and memories that are swilling around us as chemical seas. Everything seems to co-emerge as part of the raw feeling tone that is a conscious human being. These are the echo soundings of the physiological state of our body. If we are to achieve any sort of homeostasis, that state of balance that maintains our internal material, electrical and chemical conditions and reach an optimal state for the best way for us to function, we need to not only register how anxious or calm we are, but we need to reconcile various thought patterns, feelings and instincts, in such a way that we are in harmony with them. These feelings compose the soil out of which our actions will emerge and we need to maintain some type of harmony or balance, if this soil is to support ongoing healthy actions.
The congested chest
If we can visualise the raw feeling states that we have but rarely turn our attention to, we can hopefully be able to get closer to an engagement with the complex meanings that emerge out of the embodied experience we have of our world.
The images and texts that I make from conversations with people about their feelings, are all signs of emerging narratives, ones that as they come out into the open, will help everyone to accept the confusion of existence and to come to terms with that feeling of not being quite ready to face reality, or sense of unease as they come to think about the 'what's next' of daily life. The strangeness of the forms that are worked with, is partly to get past the being 'too familiar with things' stage, as the forms often associated with feelings are too clichéd for us to actually respond to them honestly any more.
A fear of incontinence
I have just made available on line one of my working notebooks, whereby some of my images of embodied feelings are collected together. These drawings were were made after having a series of conversations with others about their feelings. I made notes and then went away and developed a series of more 'worked through' images, whereby my own feelings were conjoined with the images I was trying to work with. I have been using this collection of images to help others and myself in the development of visualisations of inner or somatic feelings. The images can also be used to assess whether or not there is any close similarity with how others visualise their own feelings and if there is, perhaps a visual language of feeling representations could at some point be constructed. This is an old idea, but one that perhaps needs to be revisited. One of my aims is to eventually sit my work alongside that of long debunked theorists such as Benjamin Brett, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and Walter Russell and perhaps do this with a nod to Jean Perdrizet's speculative engineering. This is not to disprove or prove any particular theory, but to flag up a common need to find an answer to why we experience the world in the way we do. Now I am older, I really think it is time for me to sort out how my own body/mind is wired up and I have turned to counselling to help myself to understand myself. Hopefully as I undertake the 'getting to become more aware of myself ' sessions, I also get to accept that whatever it is I am experiencing is mostly fascinating and wonderful. My present and past prediction mechanisms always seem to churn my stomach up and race my heart because they are set at a default of 'something terrible is going to happen'. This has caused me to often fail before I begin, or just not experience events as they could be, being overly nervous about what others might think or too worried about what might happen to actually let myself feel and experience what is going on around me. I have learnt over the years that if I am to make anything interesting as an artist, I have to embrace the unknown, I have to enjoy the fact that I don't know what will happen and that the more I am able to do this, the better the work will be. I now actually enjoy the process of being able to do this and it's time for this emotionally safe place to be the one whereby I site the rest of myself.
Inner body, somatic awareness is concerned with sensations like feeling anxious or happy but can also be about feeling pain or its relief; all of these interoceptual experiences are as real as each other and they are entwined together. I have recently had to have a hernia operation, the process made me very aware of my groin and as I meditated on this I made images. Because I was confined to bed for a few days afterwards to allow the wound to heal, I was using my laptop computer to draw on top of and manipulate images that had previously been made using traditional drawing materials such as ink and watercolour. What emerged was a particular form that made use of a much more emotional colour range. Perhaps because I wasn't able to move far I needed to invest my emotional energies in colour thought. This is what emerged.
A visualisation of sensations post hernia operation
As an observer you may or may not 'get it'. There may not be a shape or form that carries meaning in the way I would want it to, but that still doesn't stop me wanting to communicate that invisible something inside me. Perhaps all my work is simply a desire for others to see what is inside me, to be able to transparently communicate my thoughts to others. It is though in the interaction between others that meaning will emerge, just as it must have grown out of conversations around a fire at night in caves 40,000 years ago, a thought emerges into the open, either through spoken words, that may themselves have emerged from a mouthful of air, or from drawings made with a stick in the dust on the cave floor.
Bunion pain
I'm sure many of us feel as if we are trapped inside our own mind and yearn to be able to experience and communicate with the world more directly and fully. To explore whether the visualisation of interoceptual experiences will help do this, is my research objective boiled down to its essence.
That familiar anxiety starts up again
No comments:
Post a Comment