Anatomical flap books

Mid-Edo Japan: Anatomical flap book

The curator Frances Woodley awhile ago sent me an e mail asking me if I would be interested in participating in a new artist's book project. (Which I did do and I shall put up a post about that soon). She had also, after having a look at some of my recent blog posts, suggested I take a look at Edo anatomical flap books. I love how chance associations build ideas and I opened her e mail just as I had come up from my studio, where I had been cutting up and rebuilding my recent self portrait images; images that are designed to include both exterior views of my face and interior reflections on the somatic state of my emotional life. I had been making inserts and had decided to stitch into some areas ceramic pieces designed to operate as both body organs and memories of past illnesses, in particular a memory of a time when I was plagued by boils.

Ceramic inserts set into a drawing

I decided that these inserts didn't work but something was jelling, an idea was trying to emerge and one cutout element from the drawing I was making I thought had potential, even though eventually I glued it back down into the surface. 

Detail of bottom right of interoceptual self-portrait

I was at the back of my mind thinking about those body models that are made for children, but in some sort of fusion with Chinese anatomical flap books.

As you can see from the images below, an Edo anatomical flap book sits in a space between imagination and scientific awareness. You can see intimations of forms that we would expect to see in a modern anatomical model, such as the one above and although they are related and belong to the same family of forms, the Edo book is suggestive of otherworldly forms, ones emerging from the subconscious, rather than them being the product of rational investigation. 

Flaps being turned over

I have made many images of invented inner body forms and some of the forms I invented were reliant on memories of images I had already seen, often of other cultures such as books on Tibetan medicine. Some of my attempts to depict an overall internal embodied feeling, such as in the image directly below, were partly derived from the formal language that Japanese artists such as Hokusai invented. Instead of sweeping linear brush strokes, I was relying on the convoluted edges of washes to get a similar energised interior, something I had learnt from looking at Rodin's watercolours. 

Image of how I felt, made straight after a hernia operation. 

Hokusai 

Rodin

However after looking more closely at Chinese medical diagrams such as this one below, I found myself making a series of images that were partly memories of the images I had looked at and partly my own feelings about how I could depict an inner body; a place that I had never seen, but had interoceptually felt.

I was very taken by the fact that the lungs looked like petals

The 'punctum' for myself was the fact that the lungs in some of the Chinese diagrams looked like petals; in my head I had found an animal/vegetation connection and so was released to then continue the invention.These were some of the images I came up with.

Variations on inner body feelings depicted as types of animal/vegetable hybrids

Although I made several images based on this idea, I felt they were still too close to their Chinese trigger and I doubted that anyone encountering these images would get anything more from them, than from looking at the Chinese originals. The idea needed to be pushed much further.   

Eventually I came up with an alternative solution, that during its gestation had used several paper flaps as idea try outs, (see detail above) which although eventually were glued flat back down into the drawing's surface, highlighted for myself the fact that it was perhaps the folding of flaps, in order to reveal 'what lies beneath', that was the most important lesson to be learnt from the earlier Chinese work.

Interoceptual self portrait

The use of flaps within anatomical text books is also something that is part of a Western tradition and at one time I did have a few old text books with enfolded illustrations that I had found in various second hand book shops. These were lost many years ago, but my interest has continued. In particular there can be a lot of paper/card engineering involved and that is something really interesting and might involve research into pop up books as a whole. 

Joseph Gibbons Richardson: Medicology or Home encyclopedia of health:
a complete family guide: 1904

Frederick Hollick: The origin of life and process of reproduction:1902

Contemporary pop up book

As I start cutting things out again, this is the first image to emerge.

Body with cut out sections laid over it

References:

Birkwood, K, (2020) Cut and paste: assembling multi-layered anatomical diagrams 31 January Royal College of Physicians website: Available at: https://history.rcp.ac.uk/blogs

Brown, M. (2013) Flip, Flap, and Crack: The Conservation and Exhibition of 400+ Years of Flap Anatomies The Book and Paper Group Annual 32 (2013) 6 Available at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cool.culturalheritage.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v32/bpga32-02.pdf 

An Edo- Period Flap Anatomy Manuscript From:Thinking 3D  A University of St Andrews/Oxford University research project Available at: https://www.thinking3d.ac.uk/JapaneseManuscript/

Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota.

See also:

Drawing and healing

Flesh

Articulated collage and shadow play

Imagining the immune system

Page from an Edo-Period Chinese medical text

In the Edo period medical text above, the triple burner’s (top left) function was thought to be related to the metabolic functions within the body. If so the invisible processes that transform food into energy are in some ways understood as being related to some sort of heat exchange. However the burner also seems to have been related to certain states of matter such as liquids and gases; “The upper burner acts like a mist. The middle burner acts like foam. The lower burner acts like a swamp.” The triple burner's activities are also related to the regulation of qi, the vital life force or energy that flows through the body along its meridians.

The Triple Burner isn't a physical organ, it is more like a system composed of three cavities, what we would call the chest (lungs and heart). the abdomen (spleen and stomach} and the pelvis (kidneys, bladder, and intestines). The system coordinates metabolism, respiration, digestion and fluid movement and acts like a thermostat to regulate body temperature and qi. It in effect governs the organs that you would find within these three regions, ensuring harmony, controlling stress response (the hormone system) and the body's use of matter states, which are seen as being related to vaporisation (breathing and pumping liquids), foam (digestion and transformation) and swamp (waste management), but which we tend to think of more as metabolic exchanges. Our metabolism refers to the life sustaining series of chemical reactions that constantly go on within our bodies. The conversion of energy in food into a usable form for cellular processes such as proteins or lipids, as well as the excretion of associated waste, are all enzyme catalysed reactions that ensure that we can reproduce, maintain our structural form and respond to our changing environment. I.e. the digestion and transportation of substances into and between different cells. As we get that far down the scale of things, we also get closer and closer to the quantum world, a world of unknowns and energy interconnections that it has been theorised is effected by our emotional condition.

In my own drawings in order to visualise interoceptual experiences or feelings, I have at times invented similar visual forms, sometimes thinking of fire and flames as I tried to envision gas exchange or the need to sweat. I was also thinking of arteries and veins and how they spread heat throughout the body. Gradually my imagery has become a fusion of what I have gathered from medical text books, how I imagine my own internal embodied world and what others have told me about their feelings and private understandings of internal bodily happenings. What we imagine and what we feel something could be like is often quite different to what science tells us something should look like.

Man with stomach ache (self portrait) with edges implying gas exchanges

The more I look at the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, the more I become aware of the interconnected nature of all the body's systems and that no one aspect can be regarded in isolation from the others. However in medicine we are often treated as if the bit that has gone wrong can be isolated from everything else. This is the difference between a holistic approach to healing and a more symptom-based or reductionist approach, which is most closely associated with conventional medicine. There is in the western medical tradition a focus on a specific symptom, rather than the whole person. Which means that methods like drugs, surgery or radiation are used to address particular problems. This approach which is driven by scientific methods, has of course been spectacularly successful, without penicillin I'm sure I would be dead by now, but we have more recently become aware that we might have neglected to think about how people are also emotional beings who are also shaping themselves and their health in ways that are only now becoming understood in the western world, but which were ways known about for thousands of years in other cultures.
Our bodies have their own immune systems and these are amazing. They have evolved over millions of years to combat infection and disease and they are far more sophisticated than anything yet produced by the pharmaceutical industry. It was therefore really interesting to come across the ”You and Immune System" exhibition that was held in Japan back in 2018. It was created for the brand: Meiji, by the ad agency: Dentsu, who used the illustrator Masanobu Ishii, to develop memorable images from existing electron-microscope information.

Electron micrograph of neutrophil extracellular traps and some trapped shigella bacteria

In the immune system neutrophil extracellular traps are web-like structures of DNA, histones, and antimicrobial proteins that are released by immune cells called neutrophils to capture and kill pathogens like bacteria, fungi and parasites. They act as a physical barrier to trap microbes and are a fantastic contribution to our wider innate immune response. The illustrator Masanobu Ishii, takes this type of information and then conjures up imaginary encounters between these web-like structures and pathogens, visualising them as if they are encounters between undersea creatures. 

Ishii's images exhibited in public spaces

The resultant imagery is far more powerful than the original electron micrographs. Masanobu Ishii's drawings have tapped into a world of associations that include science fiction and Manga imagery, so that the cultural distancing of scientific information is closed down and replaced by a graphic style that many Japanese observers would recognise and be familiar with. A door is therefore opened into a complex world that the average person would normally find too difficult to comprehend, but by making an analogy between fighting sea creatures and the microscopic encounters within the body, Ishii has helped to open people's eyes to the issues involved. 

Just as the Edo period medical imagery helped people at the time to envisage a world within themselves, a contemporary advertising agency has achieved a similar result, this time to alert the public of the importance of work done by a pharmaceutical company. You might feel that this work has therefore a suspect motive behind it, but sometimes it is only by tapping into the rich resources of the industrial world, that this type of communication can be achieved within public spaces outside of the fine art gallery system. 

See also:

Macro and micro embodied networks

Maps made by our nervous systems

Visualising energy flow

What lies beneath

Absence, emptiness and the void

artists' drawings a new magazine

There is a new drawing magazine out there. The first issue on drawing sculpture is out now. This is how the magazine describes what it is about:

Artists’ Drawings publishes drawings made by artists, with a focus on how drawing can be used to develop and articulate ideas. It considers ‘the artist’ to be anyone who engages in a creative pursuit and follows a broad interpretation of drawing and drawings, holding an equal interest in objects made as part of a process and as outcomes in themselves. Led by images and intentions, it combines drawings made today with others from the near and distant past. 

From issue 1 artists' drawings 

I like the fact that they use a diagram to articulate how drawing can be used to both support sculpture, as a sculptural process and to be sculpture and I felt it chimed with one of my earlier posts whereby I considered drawing as thin sculpture. 

Page layout examples

The magazine is cleanly presented and the no fuss layout ensures that you can focus on the drawings presented, as you are not having to negotiate a clever design which is sometimes the case when a publisher wants to showcase their 'art' credentials. 

It's always good to see someone taking drawing seriously as a practice, especially in a time of harsh economic reality when artists are struggling to continue to make work using expensive materials and processes. Drawing has always been the most democratic of the visual arts, the fact that it can be done on the back of an old envelope, with a stick in the sand or on the pavement with a lump of chalk, ensures that it will maintain its centrality as a communication tool to all peoples in all communities. 

The first issue features the work of a wide variety of artists, both contemporary and historical, a practice that I welcome, as it helps to remind us that drawing is an ancient practice, one that can be mined as a resource over and over again. 

Artists featured:

Cos Ahmet, Kate Appleby, Olivia Bax, Stu Burke, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Isabelle Carr, Paul Cezanne, Ben Coleman, Simon Lee Dicker, Marcel Duchamp, Charlie Franklin, G. Tyler Honn, Laura Fitzgerald, FollowTheSun, Angel Greenham, Tim Ingleby, Mykola Kornilov, Machinic Protocols – Edouard Cabay, Katya Mora, Rachel Mortlock, Sebastian Messer, Jay Ottewell, Matt Page, Auguste Rodin, Jenni Rope, Ben Rowe, Ulrich Rückriem, Victoria Sharples, Richard Tuttle, Paul Valéry, Ruolan Zhang.

This first issue also showcases the work of 5 participating artists, Olivia Bax, makes drawings from her sculpture, Ben Coleman makes collages in a similar way to how he makes his sculpture, Stu Burke explores the possibilities of folding, Isabelle Carr explores space shaped time through drawing and Victoria Sharples who explores medico/religious imagery using a drawing practice that she understands as sculptural in its own right, an approach that takes me back to my thoughts on drawing as thin sculpture.

I was particularly interested in Victoria Sharples' practice as I have recently been working in a hospital and exploring the relationship between emotional and scientific approaches to visualising medical conditions. 

Do follow the link to the magazine below and try to support this new venture if you can by ordering the paper version. 

See also:

artist's drawings The link to the magazine

FUKT

Thoughts on whether to develop a drawing magazine

An old past attempt to develop a student drawing magazine  

Drawing as portable sculpture

Drawing as thin sculpture

Drawing by touch

Fingerprint authentication has become the norm

Your fingerprint is often used to verify to the rest of the world that you are you, but even the most advanced fingerprint identification systems have limitations. 

I have commented upon the relationship between touch and drawing several times before and one aspect in particular has begun to interest me even more than it did. This is the use of touch to verify the world.

The King James Bible, John 20: 25 states this; in relation to the debate between Thomas and the rest of the disciples of Christ, 'The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.' This text was the stimulus for Caravaggio's wonderful painting 'The Incredulity of Saint Thomas'. I was going to insert an image of the painting here, but when I began searching for it on line I found this image.

The Moment of Doubt: Thomas Touches the Wounds of the Risen Christ

Underneath the image it stated, "Generated with AI: Editorial use must not be misleading or deceptive." I hadn't realised how pervasive AI was now, even a search for an image, (I had not put Caravaggio's name in on purpose, because I thought I might discover a new artist who had treated the same idea differently), was now tapping into AI generation and it does look pretty convincing. In fact if it had come with the name of an artist underneath it, I would probably have put it forward as another example of an artist illustrating how touch supersedes sight. But now, I had another reason for thinking about the issue, as yet AI hasn't really entered the field of touch and this image really does highlight how sight can be easily deceived, so for now at least I can still quote Margaret Atwood, “Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas-Caravaggio (1601-2)

In comparison with the AI generated image, Caravaggio's is so much more intense and visceral. There is real feeling in it driven by authentic experience, Saint Thomas, cant look at what he feels, the sensation is too emotionally charged for him to look directly at it, whilst in the AI generated image the actors might as well be looking at a wart on Christ's hand. 

Although slightly sent off track by my AI discovery, I'm still thinking about what started me off on this post, which was my wondering if I could use the authenticity that touch gives to sight as part of my interoceptual exploration. In particular I was thinking of bringing my 3D work in ceramics back into my drawing led research. I have of late tended to separate the two but now is the time perhaps to bring them back together, the imagery made may well have an authenticity that is more honest. I could also begin switching between drawing the body from touch and then making objects from the drawings and making objects from touch and then making drawings from the objects. I have already begun a sort of hybrid process, whereby I have made some inserts out of clay for my drawings, but this doesn't quite work. Another stage of material research is needed and it will be important to get this done before I begin working with a dancer and a poet, to see if we can work together in order to take these ideas on further.

As I write about touch, I'm reminded of a post I put up several years ago on what was called at the time, 'swell paper', so have also decided to go back to the issues surrounding how people with impaired sight deal with image making. For instance, the artist Emilie Louise Gossiaux uses a 'Sensational BlackBoard', which consists of a plastic sheet with rubber padding on top of it. When she puts her paper over the pad and presses into it with a pen, it raises up the line that has been drawn. At the same time that she draws a line, she is able to feel it with her other hand. She calls it, "Blind contour drawing".

Emilie Louise Gossiaux

She states, "I’m touching the paper, feeling its size and imagining it in front of me. I can already see the line drawing I want to make—the action that the London in that drawing will be performing—as well as the mood I want the picture to have. I gather up all that energy and I let myself feel it emotionally, too. And that’s when I start to draw." (London is her Labrador guide dog.) I was interested in her work because she interconnects with her guide dog in such a way that interspecies communication is two way. The dog licks her and she touches the dog, both having equal rights in the relationship. Touch in this case seeming to provide a flat platform on which both human and animal communication can be maintained. The attempt to make an honest straightforward image is I think exemplary. She is also a sculptor and works in clay, her installation 'Seeing with Ten Fingers' being very close in sensibility to work I have done in the past and I am thinking about returning to. When I worked with people with certain illnesses, to visualise their pain three dimensionally, in order to go on to make votives for them, I sometimes had to combine listening with looking and then with feeling by touch, as the people I worked with wanted to feel the objects made, to see if they 'felt' (in emotional terms) right. 

Crohn's disease votive

Crohn's disease is an inflammatory bowel disease and the ceramic above was my final version of a votive for someone that wanted to relieve its effects. The process began as a series of drawings and these were then translated into ceramic. The person I worked with needed to touch and feel the final agreed form, before it being put into use as a votive. (Once a votive form is agreed upon, a short ritual is undertaken whereby the person needing to use the votive, transfers their wish or desire into the object and then they either smash it, bury it, hide it, display it or give it back to me, so that it can be taken away, both metaphorically and literally). 

Emilie Louise Gossiaux

Frozen shoulder votive

Like myself her work is drawing led, Gossiaux says, "Drawing has always been an entry point for me, and a meditative process, where I envision a blank piece of paper that's in my hands. I feel it out, and that's when the images start to come. I start to visualise what it is that I am seeing in my mind." She further states that on starting the process of drawing, "I’m touching the paper, feeling its size and imagining it in front of me." In her case touch does come before sight, or is this instead of sight, or a translation of the memory of sight? The physical presence of the paper triggers an image, just as in my own case it is the moving of materials around on the paper surface that triggers an image into life.

Emilie Louise Gossiaux: Doggirl they called me: 2021

Emilie Louise Gossiaux has work in the latest exhibition at the Henry Moore Centre in Leeds, 'Beyond the Visual'. Her sculpture 'Doggirl they called me', can in this exhibition be touched and it was wonderful at the opening to see so many people taking trouble to feel their way over the objects on display. It did feel transgressive to touch Doggirl, more so than other objects such as Barry Flanagan's 'Elephant'; although her sculpture is clearly a small hybrid model of a dog and herself, she was still in reality being touched. Her melding of herself and her dog 'London' together, also transports us into a more dream like reality, one presided over by half forgotten images of Anubis. I found the work quite disturbing, it reminded me of Kiki Smith's work, she also has a sensibility that allows her, animist like, to slide between material and animal identities.  

When I was in charge of the Jacob Kramer College part-time Fine Art and Craft course, we had a blind student. He specialised in ceramics and he bought his guide dog into college every day. In order to help him move around the ceramic studio, Dave Graham, the then head of the pottery, allowed strings to be attached to the surfaces of the various tables and equipment that needed to be used by the student during the day. In effect a three dimensional map was constructed of the area, the student at its centre like a spider. By integrating him into the space, it allowed him to flow with the materials and equipment, he became a component of the studio, just as the studio became an extension of him. The student went on to make some very powerful work, however I don't remember him making anything as good as the sculpture he made of his guide dog. It was a thing of tactile beauty, it was like a mound that slumped out into the room and as it did it found shapes for your fingers, because to understand it, you had to touch it. In fact to look at it was confusing, because you read too much gravity into the image, the boniness sensations felt by touching the dog were translated into concrete, which was what the final sculpture was made of. Boniness was directly translated into the hardness of the concrete, not the look of bone held muscle, which is something else entirely. I also suspect that those feelings were not just about touch. The physiological condition of the body needs to be preserved by homeostatic maintenance. Therefore the body takes self-readings of its water and oxygen needs, temperature, stress levels, cardiac function, emotional well-being and tiredness. Some of these things we think of as physical needs and others as mental needs, but for the body and its use of chemical regulatory releases, the readings all come down to the same thing; is this something when experienced, that needs to be diminished or nourished? Our emotional well being is as vital to our survival as having enough water; the feeling of loneliness, just as important as the feeling of thirst. As the student felt his dog, emotional feelings of attachment and warmth, would be interconnected with feelings of hardness, softness and hairiness. 

In order to think through this complexity perhaps it might be useful to break down the way we touch and to think about the different qualities of experience we can sense with it. 

From: Lederman and Klatzky: 1987

A rough visual translation of Lederman and Klatzky

As we attempt to translate touch into a drawn visual language, some basic forms and their combination and interconnection with contouring can be an entry point into a way of working that then has to have folded into it marks and lines that have emotional attributes.

Victor Newsome

From: Bo Han Qiu Drawing studio

Any drawing primer, (such as the page from one above), will show a student how approaches to 3D visualisation can come together, but in order to sense an emotional engagement, other elements need to come into play. Jenny Saville's ear below being an active element in relation to the emotional read of a head and not simply a passive thing stuck on the side of the face. 

Jenny Saville: Detail

We rarely look at our ears but we often touch them and when we do, they become a site where three senses meet.. They can also be the site of ear ache and no doubt my own fiddling about by sticking my fingers into my ears when they are blocked by wax, has contributed to this. The image below is an attempt to bring together a visual translation of hearing, touching and the interoceptual feeling of inner pain, all at the same time. 

Left ear aching.  

Head with earache pain coming from the right.

Ear ache is one of those life experiences that when it is occurring does seem to verify the fact that the world is effecting us. We would do anything to relieve the pain and it is something felt inside the body, easily locatable and in need of another sort of touch, the one where we hold our hand over an ear, hoping that its warmth will help ease the pain. These sensations are also intimately connected with the body's feeling tone, the anguish of the pain and the relief we feel once the pain goes. It is no accident that we use the same words for a feeling meaning an emotional state and feeling to be aware of a sensation through touch. Therefore as I gradually try out various approaches to visualising these issues I shall no doubt have to return to Lederman and Klatzky's ideas of types of touch and to see if I can match them up with visualisations of emotional feelings. Strangely enough although I began this post thinking about how touch can be used to verify the external world, it has becomes more about how we verify our internal world, the one nobody else can feel except ourselves. Perhaps in reality they are both the same.

Reference: 

“Hand Movements: a Window into haptic object recognition,” by S. J. Lederman and R. L. Klatzky, 1987, Cognitive Psychology, 19, p. 346.

Emilie Louise Gossiaux:

See also:

Drawing textures

The imprint and the trace

Drawing as the trace of a touch

Where stains and traces meet: To touch is to believe

Cross contour drawing

Swell paper