Drawing and imagination

The more I think about it there are several types of imagination and drawing can engage directly with all of them. In fact drawing can be the process that shapes the imaginative idea and gives it reality. It is no accident that the patent office is filled with drawings of inventions, as it is those drawings that give ideas their authenticity, a drawing of a concept being often the first time that we can see if an idea appears realistic. 

So perhaps it's worthwhile exploring how we might think of different types of imagination, and as I do so, it's also worth remembering Bruno Latour's insistence that there are no actual divisions between things, simply constantly shifting connections, so as I write I will probably flit from one type of imagination to another, so that eventually a woven fabric emerges that is made of imaginative strands, so as you read try to let your own imaginations flow between the sentences and imaginatively unearth for yourself more ideas as to what our imaginations might be. 

Reproductive Imagination:

• The reproduction of a memory or of a glimpsed experience is a very problematic process. The information is sometimes hardly there and you have to tease it back into existence. This is why it is an imaginative activity, as you have to 'fill in the gaps' in order to make the memory or experience coherent and communicable to other people. How do you visualise a previous experience? How can you reproduce something that will only ever have been experienced by a perceptual apparatus, which we know is limited and incredibly selective?  Drawing gives you the ability to find a shape for a mental image of something you have experienced in the past; you can't take a photograph of that past event, but you can draw something that helps to show what you experienced. It is an iterative process and one that gets easier the more drawing you have done. So how does it work? We are very good at making comparisons between things, we can very quickly spot whether something is more like something else than not. So if I draw two images of a dog I once had, I can look at them and decide which one is closer in appearance to how I remember that dog. I can then draw another image of the dog and compare it to the selected best fit from the first two drawings. This one will either be a better or worse fit. The process can go on for as long as it is needed, which is why this process is about finding an image, you need to look hard in order to discover what is revealing itself.  Another way to approach this is with an easily adjusted material such as pencil or charcoal; what you can then do is rub out and redraw, rub out and redraw, each time looking at and critiquing the drawing as to whether or not it is beginning to reproduce something of the original experience seen. You need a certain confidence to do this and some experience of drawing, because if you are looking for a certain level of verisimilitude you need to be able to control formal elements, such as the construction of a convincing space to fit the experience into, the ability to control tonal values in order to give a convincing idea of the way the experience was lit, etc. The more experience the drawer has, the more a memory can be rebuilt convincingly. But it is important to remember that it is through imaginative play and the manipulation of materials that these images evolve, there is no direct access to a memory. There is though another type of related image; eidetic images are more like vivid emotional snapshots, that form spontaneously in response to significant life experiences. As Magsamen and Ross, (2025, p. 44) state, 'They differ from memories, dreams, guided visualisations, or symbolic images in that they are concrete imprints in our minds of real and factual historical events.' The image isn't a copy of what was experienced, but its not made up. 'You are envisioning a picture in your mind that reflects an emotional state.' (Ibid, p. 45) Because these images are more emotive, they are often the ones that we are most fascinated by, especially as they emerge out of the subconscious mind. Seeking to capture the fleeting momentary glance, such as the one made by Michael Taussig in his notebook, under which he wrote 'I SWEAR I SAW THIS', can be another way that the reproductive imagination works.

Michael Taussig's notebook


The mental replaying of what was experienced is very complicated, because the brain is constantly processing information and deciding whether or not it is useful or not. So we often find that the mind is stripping down experiences into essences. In my own experience, I often find myself when drawing, lost inside the processes of looking for veracity in terms of 'reproduction' and have come to a conclusion that nothing is ever accurately reproduced or exactly copied, therefore it is the process of looking that stimulates the imagination, not the thing being reconstructed. I can imaginatively reframe eidetic experiences and as I do I look for veracity in some sort of confirmation that the image that is arriving makes sense in terms of how images make sense. 



Drawing made after experiencing a body scan

A print developed from the image above

I made a drawing as soon as I was able to after having a body scan after an accident. It was as you can see very sketchy but the essential idea was there, in fact enough of an idea for the drawing to be used later as the framework around which I would develop a print. Long after the event, I can now sort of trace the image back and think about where the visual idea emerged from, and in my case I think that it was derived from my many visits to the British Museum's Egyptian collection, my being wrapped around by the architecture of the scanner, feeling in my visual mind, like an entombed mummy. In trying to quickly reproduce an experience, it was the imaginative enfolding into my visual mind another image seen many years before, that enabled that image to emerge.  

Creative Imagination: 

This type of imagination goes beyond imaginative recall and involves generating novel ideas, concepts, or solutions. It's the ability to combine existing knowledge and experiences in new and original ways. You could argue that the Surrealists' praise for the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont, were in recognition of his ability to push imagery to extremes by bringing together objects and ideas in ways that broke our traditional way of thinking about them. This is the passage that was often put forward as an example of how Lautréamont's creative imagination worked.

'I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft spot of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!'

Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror, Canto VI, Verse 3 

A sketchbook drawing done from a composed object 

For instance in my own work, the drawing above was made in response to a correspondence with another artist. I had sent them a pair of ceramic legs that I had in my mind thought of as small versions of the legs of Baba Yaga's hut. 

Baba Yaga's hut

Baba Yaga is a supernatural figure from Slavic folklore, often depicted as an old, fearsome woman who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs. What is for myself interesting about her is that she represents a contradictory force that can be malevolent or wise, as well as being a powerful entity that can help us achieve our aims. Associated with nature and the supernatural she is also very domestic, flying in a mortice and using the pestle to steer. I sent the legs through the post knowing that I had also made other pairs for myself to use. Weeks later I received a bundle of stuff entitled 'My brain in a nest of spikes', the other artist had responded and my further response was to put the 'nest' on top of another pair of legs and draw the result, which I did several times. I then went on to make another much larger drawing, the scale of which allowed the materials to speak far more.

An A0 size drawing done from a composed object 

I then went on to make a ceramic version.

Ceramic object 

The final ceramic object still echoes the Baba Yaga's hut image, but it also refers to the other artist's image of her brain in a nest, the final ceramic closing in my own mind a mental image gap between a bird's feet and a bird's nest. This animist 'portrait' of an artist, was prodded into being by the juxtaposition of two things, their coming together creating a new thing that hopefully says something else about the human condition. 

I suppose the classic format for this type of imaginative encounter is an exquisite corpse drawing. 

Cadavre Exquis, André Breton, Jacques Hérold,
Yves Tanguy, Victor Brauner. Figure. 1934

Perceptual Imagination:

This form of imagination shapes how we interpret sensory information and how we perceive the world around us. It involves the mental processing and organisation of sensory data, influenced by past experiences and expectations, but primarily focused on imaginatively thinking about how we see. 

Cézanne is the role model that I was introduced to many years ago as the artist to explore if you wanted to understand the perceptual imagination. He was perhaps the first artist to make work that was centred on a worry about how he saw. Seeing for Cézanne was not about reproducing what was out there, it was an imaginative answer to a question. This insight opened a door to Modernism and his example of dogged visual research is one that artists like David Hockney and myself still find inspiring. 

Cézanne: Still life

The visual flicker of looking is the rhythmic underpinning that structures a drawing that could easily fall apart. It is though an image that relies on a huge imaginative leap and makes an awareness of our perceptual processes central to the imagination. Once we have begun asking how we look, we go on to ask how do we feel, how do we smell or hear the world? 

More recent investigations into the nature of our nervous system now include an understanding that our emotional responses are an integral component of our perceptual system as a whole. This I would argue, opens out possibilities for the development of visual inventions, that take the form of models of how we perceive. Through the development of inventive ways to shape visual ideas in relation to what we see, artists can help others to intuit what it is they are shaping as they themselves see. 

The energy fields of looking at a weathered concrete surface embedded within a sea defence

Image made from looking at footage of an out of focus soldier in the background of news footage

David Abram however argues that imagination is an attribute of the senses themselves. It is not for him a separate mental facility, it is he states...'the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given'. I read this as a way to think about the intuitive aspect of imagination. Abram suggests that this is all about the participation of our senses in the phenomenon of life. He is interested in magic and magic creates its effects via either the law of similarity, which involves imitative or mimetic magic or the law of contact or contagious magic. Both approaches seek links of some sort between one thing and another and it is in the looking for these links that once again the imagination is triggered. In the case of the image of the soldier above, it might take a little while to 'see' the soldier, but if you look to the top of the image and cut out from view the large blob that takes up most of the space, you should be able to see a ghost like head wearing a helmet.

Triggered imagination

Artists have used all sorts of devices to trigger imaginative invention. Michelangelo would look at clouds and see ideas for sculpture in them, Leonardo could see landscapes in the fetid moss covering of an old toilet wall, Max Ernst would make frottage rubbings and see Surreal images starting to emerge from the swirls of wood grain and other surfaces that he took rubbings from. If something is not quite fixed, is halfway between one thing and another, the mind will make decisions as to what these things might be. It's an old flight or flight survival mechanism, if we had to go back each time and look at a situation to check what it might actually be, the chances are that any threat would have time to actualise and in a time of great danger, kill you. So mechanisms evolved that made fast decisions based on small amounts of information, better to run away from a perceived threat, even if it wasn't actually real, than to not run away from a real threat. 

Max Ernst: Frottage 1925

There is no harm in running away from a shadow that looks like something. The shadow can be used to trigger a range of ideas, from hands looking like a bird in flight or a rabbit, to the fact that it also casts an image that can in certain projections be a likeness. This apocryphally lead to another type of invention, one that demonstrated one way of how drawing could capture a likeness of something.

Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine “The Invention of Drawing,” Etching: 1773

Much of this type of visualisation is mentally rehearsing the possibility of an event, which activates the same areas of the mind/body as real-life situations would do. This process it has been argued (Robson, 2025) refines neural pathways, enhances motor control and strengthens preparedness. By simulating challenges and practicing outcomes in our minds, we can better manage how we think about possibilities, i.e. not over worry about them and improve our performance in both physical and mental tasks, simply because we have been practicing making responses to possibilities. 

Structured imagination

Structured imagination is a type of very organised logical thinking, that is designed to create invention by the imposition of a logical iterative process. A classical example is François Blanciak's 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms'.  As you can see from the images below, Blanciak provides us with what have been called by Ian Bogost, 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms. An exercise we used to set on the old Leeds art foundation course was to explore how many variations of interacting basic forms you could draw. For instance take a pyramid, a cube and a sphere, Then think of as many ways as possible they could be interpenetrated to make new forms. Blanciak's forms are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order or end to the series. No one thing is more important than another, but each one raises possibilities for future actions. 

 

From 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms' by François Blanciak.

In Ian Bogost's, book 'Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing', he introduces the idea of 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms.

Todd McLellan Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living

In each of these cases a logical encounter instigates a process whereby ideas are generated by the implementation of iterative thinking. 

Cultural imagination

• This type of imagination refers to the shared narratives, beliefs and values that shape a culture. It influences how individuals within a culture perceive the world and their place within it. One of the easiest ways to illustrate this is to put examples of the art of different cultures next to each other. 

Sardar Visava Singh of Sandawalia with his courtiers: Chajju: 1800-1810 Opaque watercolour and gold paint on handmade paper pasteboard

Jan de Bray:The regents of the Leproos, pest en Dolhuis in Haarlem 1667 Oil Painting

Utagawa Kunimaru (1793-1829) Woodblock print

One issue that comes out as soon as you put images together from different cultures is how much the preferred materials of making are also shaping the imaginations of the time. 

Religion can of course be an important shaper of ideas, 

Tantric art: Rajasthan: Unknown artist and time

Transfiguration: Ivanka Demchuk: Orthodox Christian tradition

Enso Circle: Japanese Zen 

The cultural imagination of the western world is a fast moving one that is shaped as much by  technological progress as by old belief systems and cultural histories. The dominant culture, that of the USA is, as is often the case historically, a dominance based on economic and military power. 

Micky Mouse is embedded into our collective psyche as much as the McDonald's sign or Donald Trump's face and our cultural imaginations are shaped by these things. 

It seems a not very uplifting or positive way of finishing a post on the imagination to conclude with an image of Donald Trump. However if I look at my own experience of trying to imaginatively think about things lately, my concentration levels are falling, my mind is constantly pre-occupied by news of his actions, making it very difficult to get lost in any imaginative world that he doesn't inhabit. In terms of the imagination being rooted in hominoid responses to an ancient landscape full of dangers and it's role in opening out new alternatives to support an ability to make decisions as to how we engage with the things we encounter, it is as if he totally dominates that landscape. In my imagination, news of his actions can represent a threat to me or an opportunity for something good to happen. When I meet other people, the conversation always seems to at some point include people's reactions to what he is doing, so I suspect I am not alone in finding him dominating my psychic imagination, his image now fighting the earlier dominance of Micky Mouse as a symbol of the USA. 

The cultural imagination can be like a blender, sometimes you steal, sometimes you just feel it in your bones

References

Abram, D. (1997) The spell of the sensuous London: Vintage

Magsamen, S and Ross, I, (2025) Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform us Edinburgh: Canongate

Robson, D. (2025) How visualisation sets you up for success by changing your cognition New Scientist May 28th Available from: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2480780-how-visualisation-sets-you-up-for-success-by-changing-your-cognition/ Accessed on 20. 10. 25

See also: 

The line of disjuncture

Touch, photography and frottage as indexical forms of drawing

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Seeing things for the first time

Disease as an aesthetic project 

Bob Dylan and Drawing

John Lennon

Of my two main adolescent musical influences John Lennon was the only one who I was aware of at the time that drew as well as made music, but it was Bob Dylan who opened my eyes, because his music was as much visual as verbal, as much about image as melody. I'm reminded of this because Bob Dylan was performing in Leeds this last week and at exactly the same time as he was on stage at the First Direct Arena, I was sitting in the City Varieties Theatre listening to O'Hooley & Tidow performing one of their last shows before formally ending their musical collaboration. At one point during the evening Heidi Tidow reminded us that Dylan was playing at the same time within a few hundred yards and thanked the audience for choosing to see them instead. Their song 'Two Mothers' is about the universal experience of having a mother and becoming one and as a lesbian couple they are very aware of situations where a child is given away to new mothers, who will now have to undertake the responsibility to sing lullabies. They are regarded as being part of a continuing folk tradition and are artists local to my West Yorkshire area; Dylan's example still encouraging others to get on stage and perform songs about their lives, even though they may be very different to the one that Dylan told us about. In many ways I felt that I was honouring my debt to Dylan by being there rather than going to see him, he doesn't need my support and if I had been to see him, it would have been more about being in the same room as him, than about hearing new stories from folk songs. His model, one he inherited from Woody Guthrie and many others, of making musical poetry out of the condition of the world, is hopefully one that will continue to be passed on, generation to generation.

 'Two Mothers': O'Hooley & Tidow

It was Dylan that opened my mind many years ago to the possibility of making art out of experience. My teenager mind was listening to lyrics such as "Put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground", (from 'Ballard of a Thin Man': Highway 61: Revisited), and as it did it visualised the words for me, I could clearly see that image of eyes sitting in a pocket and a nose pressed to the ground; it was a bit like being on an acid trip without having to take acid. Dylan's voice was for me the voice of a contemporary poet, it was authentic in a way that 'good' singers never were for me. Perhaps I don't have a very musical ear, but there was an edge to how he came across that said, "I mean this, like it or not, this is how I see the world." 

One thing I learnt quite early on was that you shouldn't try to analyze his songs. Friends who just didn't get it, would say to me, "But what does it mean?" At the time I found it hard to explain that the meaning emerges as a feeling that you get from the interplay of lyrics, melody and his voice and is never fixed. His writing was I felt and still do, deliberately ambiguous and when embedded into his music the totality creates an overall atmosphere that I would as a teenager sink into and use to leave the world behind. I liked the fact that he could be surreal, a documentary maker, a poet that would write about a memory or a heartache, be outraged, be funny or perhaps be just trying to capture a feeling that he had. I felt I wanted to say stuff about all these things too, but I was tongue tied. Above all, I felt that his art (and I really did feel that what he was doing was art), was an expression of what it feels like to be a human being, trying to make sense of being alive and that it seemed to me was probably the most amazing thing that any human being could want to do. His records shaped me, my decision to be an artist, was very much made because I recognised something about the creative spirit in myself, something I first saw as I glimpsed myself through the lens of his words. 

I still listen with eager ears to any new recording that he might make, especially as we have both continued to make art as we have aged. I dread to hear that he might have died, as I fear that something of myself will die with him. He has in my mind, been a fellow traveller for over 60 years and I feel I understand why he still needs to tour, even though he is now in his 80s. Each time he plays those songs, he must find something new in them. The times that his work emerges into change and as they do, reception morphs; the song never remains the same. The older I get, I think I work harder. The more work I do, the more I realise there is more to say. I sense that he feels that too. Why stop, what else would you do? 

In Love minus Zero no Limit', there is a line "With your mercury mouth in the missionary times", an image I remember arose in my mind as I first heard it; a certain languid feeling, slid into a taste of metal and as it did it poisoned the image I had begun to draw in my mind, making it awkward and difficult to accept. Out of those moments of difficulty I began to get a handle on what this art stuff was about, it was making the familiar strange and it was hard work. As I got older and became 'professional', I continued to find images in his lyrics that would inspire me, especially when he left me surprised by how he put things. I have even made drawings in the past responding to what critics have said is Dylan's worst song, 'Wiggle, Wriggle', from 'Under a Red Sky; the line ''Wiggle 'til you're high, wiggle 'til you're higher, Wiggle 'til you vomit fire', somehow hit me splat in my insides. I always did wriggle too much, my father said I suffered from St. Vitus Dance, I could never keep still and even now I find it difficult to sit down and watch a TV programme, without having to jerk my leg around, raise my arms or keep twisting my neck. It was that album that reminded me of the power of nursery rhymes and that sometimes you just had to go back to being a child if you wanted to renew yourself. I suspected Dylan had children around at the time, as I did and somehow I had to let their world into mine. 

Sketchbook page: Idea for fire/eye vomit

I'm still making images about vomiting up what's inside

Over the last few years we have seen more and more of Dylan's visual artwork. He sometimes couples his hand written out lyrics with his own illustrations, as in the image and text pairing below of 'Lay Lady Lay'. But these images although competent enough, are not going to open any new perceptual doors for me. I can see that he enjoys making them and everyone needs a way of releasing those images that stack up in your head but at the end of the day it is still his lyrics and the way he sings them that move me. 

Bob Dylan: Lay Lady Lay

Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself," contains the line, "I contain multitudes" and in 2020 Dylan revisited the idea himself, this time listing the people who crowd within him, it was as if they were all trying to get out. But as they do they climb over each other and a multi-headed creature begins to emerge; all push and shove, all masters but no leaders. We are all like that, underneath the thin skin of ourselves lives a congregation of others and this is perhaps Dylan's main legacy. He reminds us that we are all multiples of the many, that we inherit the forms of others and that there is no such thing as a truly unique individual. We take what we are given and we reweave the elements into new clothes. An attempt to get those clothes to fit perhaps being what many artists spend most of their time doing.

There is also something about Dylan's voice, that rough and worn thing that is not at all lovely, but which gives authenticity to the lyrics. It is for myself a sensibility akin to Cézanne's touch, sometimes crude, harsh and ugly and yet at other times exquisitely sensitive but always totally sincere. When at its best art is 'artless', it just is what it is. Style it seems to me is art's enemy, an infiltrator that snuck into the building via aesthetics. I was never a gifted draftsman, always a clumsy maker and it took me a long time to accept that, but once I did, I felt the work I began to do became more honest and less an attempt to cover up visual weakness with intellect. 

Bob's voice when young was the sound of my adolescent mind

So yes I'm still an adolescent in some ways, never getting over a first love. I remember that I used to watch snails in the garden when I was very small, I was fascinated, I wanted to know them and inhabit their world.  I still love snails and sometimes make images based on them, defenceless, without their shells. Something old and yet always new. Dylan was often accused of plagiarism but we are all plagiarists, if not we would never be able to communicate with each other, he takes Whitman's line and re-digests it, acknowledging the fact that without Whitman there would be no Dylan, but without Dylan many of us, including myself, would never have read Whitman. We are all interconnected and inseparable from the world, something we should acknowledge or else we pretend that we are self determined isolationists, a self conceit bolstered by Capitalism, one that it seems to me, has led us to destroy the very ecosystems that we evolved within.  

Snail votive

See also:

Drawing and wellbeing

Eye music

Andrew Lister Another artist who listened to Bob Dylan

A review of Pushing Paper A reminder to myself of how often Dylan comes to mind

Fine art?

A linear enjambement

Rosemarie McGoldrick: 'Animalcules IV' (2025)

An enjambement in verse is the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line. For instance the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, is constructed in such a way that everything depends upon a continuation of the first line, therefore the first line ends without punctuation, so that the thought continues into the next line; thus creating a sense of flow.

William Carlos Williams
XXII from Spring and All (1923)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a short haiku like poem that makes us aware of how objects work upon our personal sense of a visual poetry.

The line that continues is also something that can be purely visual. Rosemarie McGoldrick has an exhibition of her work on at the Centre for Recent Drawing at the moment and she uses a sense of enjambement in her drawn images depicting microscopic forms of imagined plankton and geometric krill. She is another example of an artist trying to visualise the invisible and I was particularly interested in her work because of the idea of enjambement. When I was looking at  permeable boundaries, such as the ones that surround an amoeba, I was trying to visualise how the body of the amoeba was open and flexible, becoming at times part of the surrounding environment and at other times seeming to reassert itself, switching from one state to another. I saw in McGoldrick's images a possibility of a type of visual language using a linear enjambement, that could allow me to redraw microscopic and human sized forms in such a way that they were interconnected much more clearly into their environment and to each other. It also fitted very well with my earlier thoughts about lines as symbols of invisible forces. 

Two stages of relationships between bacteria, feelings, their human hosts and other things

Lines of relationship are constantly shifting and when trying to visualise an embodied complex of interoceptual feelings, some areas are just blank. In the image above the black blobs were drawn as indicators of unknowns that still have complex relationships between all the other aspects of a being situated in an environment. One issue I have also had to think about in these type of images is how power is depicted. I have been looking towards the depiction of what is sometimes called a 'flat ontology' or sets of equal relationships between things. However I'm also aware that as soon as we focus on something it has more power in our minds over other things, that then move into the background as we shift our attention away from them. For instance in the image above the form moving into the frame from the left hand side is weightier than the more complex form situated in the middle of the image. The connections between are though drawn as if they are of equal weight. Perhaps my thoughts can be clarified by referring to another image that uses similar lines to depict a relationship. 

Mesmerism

The invisible power of mesmerism is represented in the image above as another example of a male exerting power over a female. However I'm more interested in the lines of force being rather like the strings attached to a puppet. 

Although the hand of the puppeteer is usually thought of as a means of control and the strings the means by which that control is asserted, you can see it as being a relationship that goes both ways, the puppet in effect also directs the puppeteer. Connections go both ways. 

It is however Jorinde Voigt's use of lines to express relationships that I reference in my own drawings, as her images are reflections upon the transience of experience and the impossibility of actually recording it. In her drawings I see a glimpse of Cézanne's struggle to draw how he saw; as in Cézanne, there is a beauty in Voigt's work that emerges in relation to her seeking to pinpoint life's ever changing patterns. 

Jorinde Voigt

The drawings that were on display at this year's Turner Prize exhibition by Nnena Kalu were also a type of linear enjambement. In her case the drawings were all repeated, the continuation of the sentence beyond the end of a line, being accomplished by picking up a swirling linear thought  and doubling it. Her drawings seem very much about her own energy, about her body's movement and a celebration of it. Although related in form to some of Voigt's drawings, Kalu's feel less of an emotional dilemma, more a celebration of her existence than a struggle to affirm it.

Nnena Kalu

Nnena Kalu's doubling reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg's Factum 1 and 2.

Robert Rauschenberg: Factum 1 and 2: 1957

Factum 1 and Factum 2 are nearly identical, both using the same mixed-media techniques, of collage and paint on canvas. Rauschenberg's doubling, is this case is more a commentary on art's originality and uniqueness, paint never dripping in exactly the same way, every abstract expression being an original feeling. However the style of collage next to free paint marks, makes each 'combine' out to be a 'unique' Rauschenberg. Nnena Kalu's drawings are similar in that they are not exact copies, but close enough to at first sight be seen as identical doubles. Rauschenberg's approach being more cerebral, whilst I feel Kalu has found her way more instinctively. All of these attempts to meditate on the nature of the creative act involve in one way or another the continuation of a communication beyond an initial setting out of what is to be communicated. They are like hair extensions, attached to the starting point, but going much further, becoming something new in the process.  

See also

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Jorinde Voigt drawing as abstraction and metaphor

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

The emotional line

A straight line

The art of memory

 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

I was thinking about Frances Yate's wonderful book, 'The Art of Memory' the other day. I haven't read it for many years but I was reminded of it because not long ago the artist Rosie Vohra had been asked to make a personal selection for exhibition within the Leeds Arts University library and she had chosen an artist's book that I made over 40 years ago, 'An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness'. I wrote the text for it at a time when I was under the influence of Yates' book and some of the images directly reflect the types of structures she used as illustrations in the book. Looking at the images again I was reminded of the fact that I was also trying to make sense of computer technology. We had been trying out a new type of wax printer, that took wax coated paper sheets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and ran them one after the other through a series of rollers that passed underneath a heater, whilst at the same time thousands of pins  pushed down on the sheets in the areas designated by your design, that had been converted into CMYK separations, thus transferring the wax to the print paper. It was a clumsy process and we only ever had that one printer and it was never replaced. However, because there were now four layers of wax, there was a certain richness to the surfaces laid down and I wanted to make use of that. The final images were printed off and bound together with a text that I had typeset also using a computer and that I thought was it. At the time I thought it was a very good piece of work, but now on re-examining the book I realise that I ought to have bound glassine paper into the book between pages, because over the years the wax has begun to rub off onto the facing pages. However the fact that the book was out on display gave me a chance to photograph it and of course rethink what I might be able to do if I revisited the idea. 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

Frances Yates introduced me to several ideas that have cropped up again and again in my work; in particular because memory enhancement was part of rhetoric training and rhetoric was about getting your ideas across to other people in memorable ways. Something that as an artist I'm constantly having to think about and as a former lecturer who used to introduce students to communication theory, I owe it to myself to always remain aware of these issues. 

Playing with the idea of what comes where in terms of a visual hierarchy

Since making the book, I have become much more interested in animism and ideas that touch upon a 'flat ontology' or level playing field, when we come to look at our relationships with other things. The medieval idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, elements (fire, water, etc.) and finally, inanimate objects like rocks at the bottom, is still in many ways how human beings think of the world and how it relates to them. Perhaps because of the spread of atheism, God and angels no longer have pride of place, but that often means that we humans then take top spot. In my watercolour image above, a cow has reached the top of the stairway but is about to fall down, leaving a field of wheat in top spot. I was playing with hierarchies, trying to subvert the order of things as usually pictured by humans.

However going back to Yates and her explication of how memory training was used, in particular in relation to Cicero's work on rhetoric, one of the big issues was making images that were startling in their appearance and also linked to what you want to remember by some sort of likeness. For instance, testis is a Latin word for “witness” and was used in Cicero's time in relation to witnessing one's manhood, therefore the words testify, testimonial and testament share a common etymology with the word testicle. Cicero at one point suggests that in a speech, if you want to remember that now is the time to speak about certain legal matters, you could mentally place a giant pair of testicles at a particular spot within a building that you were in your mind walking through, to help you remember the various components of your speech. It's a good image and one I must try out as a drawing at some point. We have all at one time or another tried to remember stuff and have realised that we can do this much easier if we can find a link to something else, especially a link that also takes a memorable shape and locates what we are trying to remember in a pictured space that you can mentally hold in your mind. For instance; if you want to remember a shopping list, you can visualise each item in its place on the shelves of a supermarket. Then you can picture yourself walking through the various aisles and picking up what you need. A renaissance memory theatre operates in a similar way; theatres, such as the Globe, were places most people knew, just as a supermarket is now. Therefore in people's minds they could visualise the structure. Aisles and rows of seating could be set out in a way we are all familiar with and to this day we still go to a theatre or cinema, expecting to make our way to row H, seat 12 etc. It was a space that was easily cross referenced and particular spots pinpointed. Within this space, you could then place the various things you wanted to remember. However certain theorists at the time, such as Giulio Camillo, went further and decided that they could control the system and give it an overall structure that related to that idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchical system, that fixed into place and ordered all things.

Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

This is how Frances Yates describes Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre; 

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades."

My present day version would be the memory supermarket, shelves stacked with knowledge packets instead of cereals or frozen foods, the fresh food aisles being now places to find new untested ideas, the cleaning products section perhaps devoted to philosophy and ways of thinking, such as the use of Occam's Razor. The bread shelves might be devoted to staple knowledge and the cake section where you might find titbits of information. The science of electro-magnetic fields might begin with the electrical goods section, whilst chemistry was located in the cooking supplies area and biology located where potted plants are. I think you get the drift.

James Joyce was fascinated by Giordano Bruno, who was one of the inventors of the art of memory. In Ithaca, the 17th part of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stops “chanting” a Jewish “anthem… in consequence of defective mnemotechnic”; a reminder that in his mind Joyce was both trying to bridge between the everyday and the mythic and build a memory structure in order to do this. He uses everyday events as a series of triggers to reference Homer's Odyssey; this final chapter of Ulysses recounts the very mundane events that happen as Leopold Bloom takes Stephen Dedalus home to number 7 Eccles Street for a cup of cocoa and to discuss the night's experiences; the chapter's title being an allusion to Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. Joyce suggests that every day is a journey and in its own way that journey can be as eventful as the voyages of Ulysses. 

The chapters of Ulysses in their own way are also therefore a type of memory structure, the important issue for myself being that everyday events and things can be used to help us think about big issues. I have written a blog post about the hand as a memory system, (as always check out the 'see also' section at the end of each post), a reminder of how much of our thinking is embodied.
The linking of things by finding connections is also something that can be used in the construction of magic and is the reason ritual objects have the power they have. In order to work, magic objects must have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning, the contact if not directly physical, usually being a likeness of some sort. This process is termed the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. It can also operate by 'touch' which is a very physical connection. For instance a witch doctor could curse the ground that you might walk on; if so you will need protection, to stop that curse getting into your body. This is why historically in India and China and in many other cultures, people used to wear ankle bracelets. A curse would need to pass up and through the ankle, in order to get into the torso, which is the seat of all our vital organs and a charm bracelet worn around the ankle could prevent this. The bracelet also acting as a physical reminder of the need to be mindful of psychic attacks. 

My work developing contemporary votives at one time overlapped with the design of charms, each one a response to a conversation about someone's worries. The charm bracelet above was designed as a type of three dimensional memory object, each charm shaped to reassure the wearer that some sort of psychic protection was in place. Gradually I was becomming aware of things like memory beads, rosaries and South American quipu, all external to the body and operating as recording or memory devices that began with touch and yet were also to be seen. They were of course operating as external brains.

References:

Barker, G. (2023) Votives and Charm Bracelets Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects. In: Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body: Palgrave Macmillan, London

Joyce, J. (2010) Ulysses Wordsworth Editions

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press

Yates, F. (2014) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition London: Routledge

Yates, F. (2014) The Art of Memory London: Bodley Head

See also:

Connecting the singularity 

Memory drawing and hands

Faraday's lines of force

Magic

Deer teeth, perception and symbolic language

Votives and charm bracelets

Drawing and communication theory

Knots