Friday, 27 June 2025

Drawing consciousness

Thinking about my body while walking through landscape

I’m still thinking about how to justify the fact that when I’m working to visualise invisible sensations such as pain or certain emotions or feelings such as being worried, angry, thirsty or too full, that I rely on intuitive responses more than any form of logical analysis. This is the case in both my responses to visualising my somatic awareness of my own body and in my work done in conversation with others, whereby we jointly try to work towards the making of images that are meant to communicate interoceptual experiences. One problem is, as I have pointed out before, that my conscious awareness of the sensations I have is an interpretation, sometimes the interpretation might seem like a visual image but at other times the same information, could be received through my skin as heat. (The infrared issue) This feeling of consciousness seems to be something science can’t help me understand, or at least not the science we are used to using. Which is why I have in these blog posts occasionally reverted to the exploration of pseudo-science or outdated beliefs, in an effort to feel for a way of understanding something, that has I have come to believe, only to be understood intuitively and not logically. This is another attempt to approach the issue, this time though using some of the theoretical work produced by Regis Dutheil and his daughter Brigitte in France and first published in French in the 1990s.

Regis and Brigitte Dutheil (2024, p. 55) stated that there was an ‘incontestable correlation between physical parameters (e.g. wavelength, intensity) and the quality of the sensation (e.g. 700nm wavelengths evoke red, while 450nmare bluer).’ However as I have pointed out before this 'correlation' is suspect, because the same wavelength received via the eyes, can evoke an infrared colour for a snake or human wearing infrared goggles or contact lenses, yet also evoke a feeling of warmth if detected via the skin's thermoreceptors. However, Regis and Brigitte Dutheil go on to question whether or not sensations can be quantified. They state that it is not possible to map sensations back onto the physical effects that stimulated them into existence. They also believe that there is no functional representation of the real world mapped onto the senses; there being a discontinuity between cerebral activity and its registration in conscious awareness. (p. 56). They go on to argue that this phenomenon therefore lies outside of the ability of science to understand it; which does suggest that like myself they agree that the mind creates the sensations we become aware of. 

As they advance their argument they point out that the mind can hallucinate and as it does an individual’s conscious awareness may well tell them that what they are experiencing is true, even though those around them can clearly see that the experience is not coming from any outside the body stimulus. I. e. that the mind shapes our reality, not any outside experience. They then go on to propose that this ability of the conscious mind to shape reality is very similar to quantum mechanics, whereby an observer also shapes reality, via what is known as a superposition collapse. (p.57). In quantum mechanics, superposition is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at once until a measurement is made. Its collapse is the process where it is reduced down into a single, definite state upon measurement or observation; i. e. the potential outcomes described by the superposition are reduced to a single, actual outcome. In the same way our minds when stimulated by sensations decide what these sensations are going to be represented as. For instance, that scarf on the chair which is being activated by a gust of air blowing through the window, was for instance first seen out of the corner of my eye as a cat, however when I look again, it is redefined in my consciousness as a scarf. 

I found all this very interesting, as it for myself allows art back into the frame and their descriptions of altered states by particular drugs or meditation practices, reflected my interest in how a shaman might operate as a conduit between the everyday and the spirit world. A role that Joseph Beuys argued was something that artists could appropriate. My work to find an intuitive visual language to represent interoceptual experiences, was I felt not so strange after all and that what I was doing was also illustrating something about how consciousness itself works.

However this last week I have been out in the landscape walking and drawing. I often need to do this as it charges my batteries and feeds both my perceptual and my interoceptual imagination. When I'm drawing from the perceptions that flood in as I engage with landscape, I use my artistic interests as a filter and this last week I have been trying to see the landscape as a body, finding organs in its embedded forms, my internal somatic awareness operating as a compass to help me navigate the external world. The more I work to visualise internal worlds, the more I see the internal in the external. What I invent in drawing to capture my perceptual experiences, is I realise limited to the extents of my personal visual language and this language has been shaped by all the other drawings I have done up until the moment of making a new one, including therefore my recent attempts to visualise pain and associated emotions, which are in the background of my visual thinking as I begin to record the landscape.
I began drawing on the first day in West Wittering by looking at the coastline as something constantly being reshaped by the sea's waves, a shifting boundary that is permeable. Then once I had attuned myself to its ebb and flow, I began see the landscape as a body that flows around me as I walk through it; its fine grain the equivalent of blood platelets or the fibles I see within a split bone when looking through a magnifying glass. Sound, ground, air, vegetation all flowing past as I walk and draw, whilst bird noises talk to me and I begin to sense that they also need to tell stories of the land and what passes through it. Perhaps their songs are like drawings, I learnt recently that birds have a particular chemical high as they learn their songs, being rewarded by successful tuning and vocalising when babies, with dopamine releases. I also feel better when I get a drawing right, could this be a similar effect?
As I invent my way through drawing, I invent my way into how I might in future draw myself. I see the space of landscape as an opening for my emotions to enter and a place to give form to the body's feeling tone. Gradually my mind begins to quiet itself and accept the situation, the drawings become more focused and I feel that I am becoming entwined with my surroundings. I feel my body becoming fully immersed back into landscape and as it is, it is something to quietly and gratefully accept. 

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