Shamanism and art

Ceramic fish

I ended my last post thinking about the artist as shaman. This association has been made many times. For instance, Kandinsky believed that contemporary art and ethnic artefacts were both suffused with creativity and that the shaman as a craftsman, should be given the same level of aesthetic and anthropological appreciation as an artist. Kandinsky believed that it was not just an aesthetic affinity that cultural objects have, but that the spiritual and ethical congruity of hand made objects came into being because of an inner necessity and openness to the underlying resonances of a deeply spiritual world.
He was an early critic of the art market system and pointed out that the separation of art from popular culture, children’s art or the objects that were normally associated with ethnography or primitive art was wrong, indeed he stated that in his eyes they were often identical. As far back as1889, Kandinsky had made a visit to the Vologda governorship, coming across the Zyrjane, a Finno-Ugric population, where he met shamans and was astonished by the beauty and colours of the furnishings and artefacts that decorated their homes.

Joseph Beuys saw himself as an artist-shaman, a spiritual guide who used art to heal and transform society by connecting people to deeper, often forgotten, human and natural truths. He believed that art could be a force for social healing and when in the early 1980s I met him, he made a deep impression and helped me to find a needed belief in the power and importance of the discipline I was involved with.

However I've never been as forceful in my beliefs as Beuys, I tend to work by feeling my way towards something, rather than having a plan and executing it. For instance when I make one of my ceramic ideas, something comes into being that wasn't there before, arriving out of a muddle of thoughts and possibilities, partly as result of the material having a voice and partly out of my own desires to bring a thought into existence. Once made ceramics belong to the world of objects and many of the human made objects we engage with can also be used as commodities and even the ones initially not made as commodities, are often judged or regarded as objects that in one way or another have a relationship to commodities. Such is the power of money and exchange value. The idea that monetary value is the only way to measure worth is central to the art market and it is no surprise that the media rarely discuss art, except when it is sold at auction and fetches astronomical prices. Under Capitalism, worth has a very narrow definition and the strive towards economic success, seems to have eroded away many of our more spiritual or communal bonds and in particular in relation to the making of art or other culturally significant objects, we are loosing sight of the transformative power of objects as extended minds. However the shamanic idea that objects have fetishistic power lies not far beneath the surface of our everyday economic reality.

Marx wrote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". He saw that a belief in invisible lifelike powers existing within inanimate objects was essential to our complex meaning system that embeds the believer into the wider world of objects with meaning. Coining the term 'commodity fetishism', things were Marx believed 'magical', in that they promised 'magical' effects, that were, he would further argue 'fictional' or of no clear practical use value, but which nevertheless appeared to be the drivers for possible life changing psychological transformations. Marx never did quite get his head around the psychological power of capitalism. He took several of his ideas from contemporary writings about tribal uses of fetishes and other animist practices and it is this fact, that makes me think again about the role of the consumed object within late capitalism. I see the animist idea that underpinned Marx's original observations still in place. In recognising this, perhaps this gives us a way forward when looking for alternatives to a Capitalist model. Any alternative possibility to values based in capital, should emerge from a recognition that whatever new system comes into existence, that it would have to exercise a similar underlying psychological lever, but one that drove people into making more communally supportive decisions, rather than rewarded the economic achievements of the individual.

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object, I am not making one to sell, whereby I exchange it for cash. What I am doing is though trying to make another type of transaction, one whereby the person coming across the object is asked to think about why such a thing might exist. The art object becomes in effect a type of externalised mind, a form that allows thought to be grown around itself. The exchange value in this case depends on the receptiveness of the person encountering the object and how entangled they want to be into the possibilities the object opens for them.

For instance, in relation to a work I made a while ago now, my initial prompt to making over 300 ceramic fish was a description I came across of thousands of dead fish, washed up on a riverside beach due to an outflowing of pollution into the waters that they had previously inhabited. I wanted to ensure a moment of news was not forgotten and to make it concrete and unavoidable. I also wanted to highlight the bigger issue, which was the fact that we are constantly degrading and destroying the world in which we and all other creatures live. But as I made the fish, each one emerged out of the making as having a different 'life force', some felt as if they had more élan vital than others. Where this came from I wasn't sure, but it had something to do with my relationship with the clay out of which their various forms emerged. Somehow something of my own life force had been transferred into what had been made. Something of my personal spirit had travelled out of my body and had been transported into an inanimate material which now had some sort of animate form. I had in effect performed an ancient shamanic rite and in doing so had also made 'fetishes'. Fetishes that in this case were meant to be found by people who were exploring this small stream in Barnsley.

Fish installation and three individual fish

There are different types of shaman, I don't for instance operate as a spirit walker, the type of shaman that can leave their body behind and travel in spirit form, but as a maker I do feel I have access to a shamanic tool kit. These tools are though not just physical objects but are things possessing spiritual significance that can be used to help make objects come into being, that are designed to connect people with concepts that have the potential to bring about change in their inner thoughts, energies or beliefs. 

This interest in art as a shamanic practice goes back to when I was a student at Newport College of Art. It was there that I first read the work of Mircea Eliade and Carlos Casteneda. After this experience, I had an intuitive feeling that a shamanic aspect of art practice was still viable, but didn't know how to harness this feeling. Casteneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge' was widely read by artists in the early 1970s and although now more regarded as fiction, the ideas were very powerful and they developed an intuition that shamanic practices were still possible. 

It was only after working more as a community based artist and eventually as a votive maker, who then found himself more recently working in a hospital setting, that I have perhaps finally begun to see what my previous experiences were hinting at.

Another influential writer who also wrote about the continuing importance of shamanism and who has helped me in the past to make sense of what I do is Lewis Hyde. In particular the idea of art making as a gift. According to Hyde (1983): 'The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition…. A gift revives the soul.' This is an incredibly romantic idea and to offer up what you do as a gift is a rare thing, mainly because we are brought up to believe that we need a monetary reward for our labour, if not we cant put any food on the table and we die. However I now have a pension, having worked for over 50 years at what is now Leeds Arts University, so I am in a position to offer some of my time as a gift. 

The importance of reciprocity needs a little fleshing out, something however for another post. 

References

Casteneda, C. (1990) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge London: Penguin

Poggianella, S. “The Object as an Act of Freedom. Kandinsky and Shaman Art, in Evgenia Petrova, (ed), Wassily Kandinsky. Tudo comença num Ponto. Everything starts from a dot , State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, 11/11/2014 - 28/09/2015, pp. 29-39 Available at: https://www.academia.edu/41629506/The_Object_as_an_Act_of_Freedom_Kandinsky_and_Shaman_Art?email_work_card=abstract-read-more

Eliade, M. (2020) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy New York: Princeton University Press

Marx, K. (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. p. 165.

See also:

Audience as Shamanic community

Drawings of nervous systems

Why I'm making animist images

In praise of verbs

Exhibition: Piscean Promises

Penone draws a tree

I'm still thinking about the implications of last week's post on the fold. I remember seeing a video of Giuseppe Penone holding his hand around the trunk of a young tree. His fingers could almost completely encircle it. He then had a cast made of his hand in that clutching shape, going on to replace his flesh and blood hand with the cast, which I think was in metal. He then left the tree to its own devices, filming it every now and again over the following years. The tree gradually shaped itself, folding its form around the hand. I thought it one of the most sensitive drawings I had ever seen. The tree was making its own shape, as it grew it responded to the intrusion of the artificial hand, flowing gracefully around it, acknowledging its presence, but not letting it get in the way of its growth, it revealed a relationship, that many of us have seen before, but not as clearly.

Tree and remains of old fence combine energy fields: Digital print

I have in the past made images myself of situations such as a tree and fence becoming entwined as the tree flows around the metal that has been erected next to it. (As above, where I thought it looked as if the tree was eating the fence.) In these images I tried to show how energy flows were intermingled; but Penone took his time and made sure his idea had properly conjoined with the life flow of the tree; making the work in 'tree-time', rather than human time. 

Giuseppe Penone: I have Been a Tree in the Hand, 1984-1991

Penone's was an art work made over many years and it reminded me that we rarely take into account the different time frames within which the world works.

Tree and gesture 1985-1991 wood with iron

During the late 1980s Penone would return to the idea several times, in the case of the image above, it is perhaps much easier to see that he was thinking of this growth event as a drawing; it being finished once the branch of the tree is removed and transported into a gallery. 

The animated short film 'Rocks' (2001), by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger, reminds us that rocks, trees, the wind, the sea, plants, bacteria, birds, insects and other creatures, all have their own particular time signatures within which they operate.

 

Das Rad

However, these rocks as observers make a fundamental mistake in their view of what is happening, they are in fact part of a much larger pattern, woven into being by a series of interrelationships, part of an, as Bohm put it, "undivided wholeness", (1995, p.134) in which the observers are not separate from what is observed. 

Penone's tree creates an analogy, whereby the tree accepts the iron grip of the hand as part of its reality and rather than rejecting it, it flows around it. This for myself clarifies the relationship between consciousness and the material world. We often think of our consciousness as being something separate from the world, it is the seat out of which we can observe the world. But as Bohm goes on to explain in the final part of 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order', "consciousness and matter in general are basically the same order" (1995, p.208), they can affect each other, "mind enfolds matter in general and therefore the body in particular. Similarly, the body enfolds not only the mind but also in some sense the entire material universe." (p.209) The atoms of our bodies being enfolded throughout all space and time, the mind and body being one. Bohm then goes to to state that, it is therefore misleading to "think of ourselves as independent entities, that interact with other human beings and with nature." (210), all are projections of a single totality. At a deeper level of order, the tree and the hand are one, the thought that brought the hand into contact with the tree, being of the same order of reality as the tree itself. 

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object there is no separation between my hand, my thoughts and the materials with which I am engaged with. Whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are again projections of a single totality. 

Notebook drawing 

In my notebook drawing made to remind myself of an experience of how a tree had grown in response to an old wire metal fence, an old moment of consciousness is frozen and becomes as physical as the initial experience. Then at a later date, this drawing becomes a starting point for a digital image, one that I have just now used as an opening image for this post, one thing triggers another into existence. 

For Penone, a tree is a perfect sculpture/drawing/work of art. A living entity that like ourselves, records every instant of its life and experience in its structure. He comes back to this several times, sometimes bringing the tree together with stone forms, as in his project for the Garden of Stone below. In this case a drawing of a possibility, comes into existence as a solidified idea, one that in its turn, becomes another reality. 

Project for the Garden of Stone: 1968

Penone at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

At other times he takes rubbings or casts from trees, in the installation “Pensieri e Linda”, below, he makes a frottage of elderberry leaves on a linen canvas, of the trunk of a thirty metre high acacia tree. 

“Pensieri e Linda”

At one point during the late 1960s Penone decided to build a ring of wax around a tree. As he did this he realised that the wax registered two impressions; the bark of the tree and the press of his fingers; a double identity, tree and human conjoined. His drawing 'I felt the breath of the wood', reminding myself of how closely humans can find themselves identified with a tree and that shamanic practices can still be integral to how contemporary art is constructed. 

Giuseppe Penone: I felt the breath of the wood

"When you have your eyes open, the space outside goes inside your mind".
Giuseppe Penone

Reference

Bohm, D (1995) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

The perfection of the tree An interview with Giuseppe Penone

See also:

Ilana Halperin: Minerals of New York

Letting things happen

Charcoal

Drawings as entanglements of life

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

The Fold

My last post about a contribution to an artist's book project reminded me of the importance of the fold as an idea. I had read Deleuze's 'The Fold' a while ago and for him the fold was part of what he called 'the theatre of matter', an idea that I found particularly powerful. Deleuze was not the only writer to find great significance in the fold as an idea. He cites the work of Liebniz as being central to an understanding of the art of the Baroque as a type of folding, a way of impacting more and more information into limited spaces. In an earlier post whereby I was trying to answer a question as to 'What is embodiment?' I brought together several strands of my thinking around this, but as always there are a few other ways to approach the concept. So forgive my repetition of certain elements, which I'm having to do as a way of reminding myself of what I was thinking, but then hopefully I can take a step further into a personal understanding of quantum thinking as both an approach to confronting subatomic reality and as a metaphor for our deep entanglement with everything that was, is and what is to be.
Tim Ingold the anthropologist is also interested in the fold and he uses it to ask us to consider the fact that life is messy and convoluted and to beware of the way academic research tends to smooth it all out. Ingold states, 'in the correspondence of voices we are an intermingling. We are part of an ever forming plenum, which is the world we live in, the cosmos, the universe. (Plenum: an assembly of all members, or a space filled with matter). Research is supposed to clear the ground, but to clear the ground is not to make a space, it simply smooths it out. The kinks, twists and knots of reality, as everything is enfolded into everything else is the true order of the plenum. The convolutions of material folding in on itself as it goes along doing its doing is limitless, because it is a process of always carrying on. The plenum is therefore perhaps time itself. We therefore live in a ‘con-crescent’ world. (Concrescent: in biology, a growing together of initially separate parts or organs). In the plenum nothing is final. The world is therefore a ‘pluriverse’, consisting of endless multiples of kinks and folds and it is this situation that we should be responding to.' Taken from my own notes written when listening to Tim Ingold speaking.

A multiple of kinks and folds which our lives consist of is for myself a good metaphor. It reminds me that I should not always be looking for answers and that answers only provide a temporary simplicity that might feel as if we are in control, but which in the end are mere sticking plasters over the intricate enfolding of real experiences. My feeling is that all we can do is to flow with the complexity and to accept that our desire for control, is in fact a deep fear of a reality that we can never know.

In order to allow us to think about this type of situation, David Bohm introduced the idea of 'explicate' and 'implicate' order, two different frameworks that we could use to help us think about both our everyday perceptual experience of the world and how we use that to come to some sort of understanding about what we think of as reality and possible realities that might lie outside of our limited embodied perceptual framework, these concepts were developed in order to explain the sometimes apparently non-logical behaviours of subatomic particles, for instance some quantum researchers believe that time doesn't flow forward but folds in on itself. In 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' Bohm described how differing contexts might change the appearance of certain phenomena. The "implicate" (also referred to as the "enfolded") order, is a deep fundamental order of reality. The "explicate" or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally construct from perceptions. He stated in relation to this, "In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements." Our 'normal' reality being the smoothed out version; again it is the enfolded complex of experience that is regarded as reality beyond our experience of it. As Bob Dylan put it, 'something is happening here but we don't know what it is.'

Perhaps though there is a halfway house, somewhere between the "implicate" and the "explicate" and this could be the gap into which art might insert itself.

In 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton, there is a recognition that quantum properties are essential to the production of life itself. The manipulation of quantum properties influencing not just biochemical reactions, (Lipton, 2015, p.99), but the creation of life itself. The first cells when beginning to form clusters needed a mechanism to entangle themselves and this mechanism would need to operate at a quantum level. Gradually as we have evolved, the quantum biology that sits below all the physical stuff that we see, touch and smell, is still in operation and its signalling systems still work to help harmonise the complex bodies we now inhabit. Lipton goes on to explain how the cells that make up our bodies are affected by our thoughts and most importantly for myself, our emotions. (An issue that I may well come back and unpick further in a future post)

Raymond Ruyler in 'The Genesis of Living Forms', wrote extensively on the evolution of early life. He was fascinated by the problem of how life forms could pass on 'memories' of their complex final forms using a single cell. Every cell forms itself out of the 'memory' of the principles adhered to by the sub-atomic forces that control the behaviour of materials. Therefore the form of each creature and its various attributes, (perhaps in the case of humans, even consciousness), are the products of the movement of relationships between atomic forces. How they can move and in what possible variations being dependent on the structural principles inherited from all the previous embodied generations of electrons and protons, neutrons and / or electromagnetic or other forces that underpin everything. These rules then determine the possibilities of events coming together in different arrangements, such as in the form of a human being.

One of the key structural elements of animals with backbones, like ourselves, is the neural tube. In relation to the developing backbone, the neural tube is the embryonic precursor to the central nervous system, which is centred around the brain and the spinal cord. The neural groove gradually deepens as the neural folds become raised and ultimately the folds meet and coalesce at the middle line and convert the groove into the closed neural tube.

The development of the neural tube follows processes similar to those observed in the development of gastrulation itself, the final enfolding that produces the tube, being reminiscent of one of Raymond Ruyler's folding diagrams, that he used to illustrate his ideas about embryogenesis.

Stages in neural tube formation

Ruyler's diagrams explaining the significance of folding to embryogenesis

In 'The Genesis of Living Forms', the folding of the earth to form the Alps is compared with the folding of a flat sheet to form a tube, which is in turn compared to the folding of cells during the process of embryogenesis, in particular during cell division and differentiation. In my post on the topology of dreams I tried to explain how orchestrated objective reduction theory, sought to bridge the gulf between physical matter and felt experience. The idea I was trying to articulate, was that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions within tiny proteins called microtubules, which are themselves found inside neurons. Consciousness being based on quantum processing performed by qubits (like binary bits, qubits are the basic units of information in quantum computing), formed collectively in cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified through the neurons themselves. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles and operate in a situation that can only exist at an intermediate scale between the subatomic and the everyday world. The vibrational mode of a single molecule is the coherent collective vibration, vibrating at the same frequency as the majority of the collective of atoms that it is made up from. This brings about an oscillating electric dipole moment at the same frequency, which forms superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations can be either electric, due to charge separation from London forces or magnetic, due to electron spin and they are also in form very like the ones that Ruyler was thinking about when imagining life's early moments.

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and they are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine

B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.

If these concepts are right, or even just semi-right, it would mean that quantum processing is being undertaken all the time within our own bodies. So what is quantum processing and how can it be undertaken by biological entities? Somehow quantum bits need to be manipulated if they are to effect change. Contemporary quantum processing is mainly developed within the field of quantum computing. Within quantum computing a “quantum” implementation manipulates quantum bits called qubits, which can have a value of one, zero or both simultaneously. When the bit is simultaneously a one and a zero, the bit is said to be in a state of superposition, where a system can exist in multiple states (like being in two places or having two properties) simultaneously, only collapsing into a single definite state upon measurement. Moreover, the state of one qubit can influence another qubit, even if they are separated by a great distance, in this case, the states are said to be entangled. Superposition and entanglement are at the heart of quantum computing and provide capabilities that can speed the types of calculation required for certain computations from years to minutes.
Within the microtubule tubulins of orchestrated objective reduction theory, oscillations switch states and they are generated by electromagnetic forces. To understand how both this biological process and a quantum computer works, we also need to understand the properties of an electron and how electrons behave in the presence of electromagnetic fields. So lets imagine for both situations a duality as set out below, where the oscillating electromagnetic energy, is both up and down at the same time.

A spin moves up and down at the same time

Now you have to imagine a Bloch sphere, (Named after the physicist Felix Bloch),
which is a geometrical representation of the pure state space, the set of all possible pure quantum states, represented mathematically as rays within a Hilbert space of a qubit. (A Hilbert space generalises the notion of Euclidean space to infinite dimensions).

A Bloch sphere

The north and south poles of the Bloch sphere are typically chosen to correspond to the standard basis vectors |0⟩ and |1⟩, respectively, which in turn can be used to correspond to the spin-up and spin-down states of an electron. Any points on the surface of the sphere correspond to the pure states of the system, whereas the interior points correspond to the mixed states.

I was listening to a Radio 4 broadcast on the world's top quantum physicists' trip to Helgoland to celebrate the pivotal 1925 summer when physicist Werner Heisenberg, escaping hay fever on that isolated German island, developed the foundations of quantum mechanics; when a quantum computing expert was asked how she envisioned quantum and she said that she saw it rather like a line that ran through the centre of a sphere, from top to bottom. One end was a negative and the other a positive and all possible angles that could be made between lines radiating out from the centre of that sphere and its surface were the indeterminacy of probability that points that were not the two fixed ones might occupy. This was for her the quantum. I later decided she was imagining in her head a Bloch sphere.

Physicists use mathematics to represent these things, as in the equations below, but I have to picture them.

The frequency of applied electromagnetic energy causes electrons to move from one energy state to another.

For physicists to measure what is going on they have to apply certain values to each element and this is how best I can grasp what is going on by cutting and pasting from various web sites and wikipedia.
Each atomic orbital, (a 3D region around an atom's nucleus describing where an electron is most likely to be found and also represents its wave-like behaviour rather than a fixed path), is represented by an energy level measured in electron volts, with the lowest orbit called the ground state. As a particle can also be a wave, its energy level has a frequency equal to the energy level in electron volts divided by Planck’s constant (the quantisation constant). Consider the diagram above. If we want the electron to move to a higher energy state, we apply electromagnetic energy at a frequency (f) equal to the desired energy level (E1) minus the current energy level (E0), which is the energy level of the ground state, which is then divided by Planck’s constant (h). The electron will absorb the energy and jump to the next quantum energy level, its excited state. Once the energy is removed, it will fall back to its original level, emitting the energy at the frequency previously absorbed. Therefore, if we can constrain the energy levels to two, we have the fundamental building blocks for manipulating ones and zeros with a single electron.

Electrons also possess a type of angular momentum called spin.

As the electron moves from one energy level to another, the spin momentum changes. At the lower energy level, the momentum is pointing down, called the “spin-down.” When electromagnetic energy is applied, the spin changes until the momentum is pointing upwards as the electron achieves the next energy level. This is the “spin-up” state. When the electron state can be defined like this, it is said to possess an eigenstate, as both the position and momentum are known and can be quantified through measurement. However it's not quite as simple as this because as Schrödinger postulated, the probability is that an electron can at any chosen moment be in neither a spin-up or spin-down state, it is most probably somewhere between. As the electron is not at one energy state or the other and not oscillating between the two, it is in both states at the same time or a superposition of the two states. Another way to say this is: when two disturbances occupy the same space at the same time, the resulting disturbance is the sum of two disturbances. We know that each energy level is proportional to frequency, and since a particle is a wave, the state of superposition is simply the vector addition of the upper and lower states. A vector addition combines two or more vectors (quantities with magnitude and direction) to find a single resultant vector. Superposition is fundamental to the operation of a quantum computer, but it carries with it the “measurement problem.” A state of superposition only can exist if you don’t “observe” it. By applying a measurement frequency pulse to a qubit in superposition, the state of that qubit collapses or snaps back to one of the two quantised energy levels, which is how quantum bits are manipulated to have a value of one, zero or both simultaneously, which in computing are the binary digits;1 for on and 0 for off.

In order to digest this I have to turn to other forms of thinking and as I have often suspected that ancient ideas of the body's energy levels and chakras are actually deep insights into these things, I reestablished in my mind a connection to the concept of Yin Yang.

Yin Yang

The Yin Yang symbol represents opposite forces that interact to form a dynamic whole. The two magnetic moments of up and down-ness could easily be symbolised by this figure. Each side of the symbol slides into itself and it is always in a state of becoming, like the Necker Cube illusion, first one then the other shape takes precedence and if you stare at the image for a while, its optical negative will appear, reinforcing the either or or yes/no value of the sign.

At the level of quantum we cant ask what or where things are, because it is all simply relationships. Just as speed is about the relationship between distance and time, it is not a thing in itself, it only comes into existence as a concept by thinking about how distance and time might relate. The idea of relationships takes us back to the entanglement of everything and that there is no such thing as an isolated individual object; as Ingold put it, "we are an intermingling."

At which point I can perhaps begin to see what this post is all about. It's not an attempt to describe how quantum biology works, or how quantum computing operates, it is about finding supportive undercurrents that help me come to some sort of heightened awareness of my art practice and how it sits alongside my ever evolving ethical framework. It's also to do with the fact that I believe that art is also about how to communicate emotion and how at some point emotion and physical reality are deeply entwined.
I have been drawing at the same time as thinking about these issues and recently have returned to making what I see as 'post-amoeba' images.

The amoeba is a powerful signifier for life itself. The way it works within a permeable membrane and manages to maintain itself as an entity, whilst it is mainly water in a water environment, its membrane just holding it together with enough force to stop it dissolving back into the water it emerged from; provides for myself a metaphor that suggests the fragile impermanence and hard fought existence of all living creatures.

An amoeba

The drawing I made of an amoeba, above, became the first of several images that gradually like the amoeba itself developed cell extensions like pseudopodia and as each one was drawn I thought more about evolution, interconnectedness and entanglement. 

The amoeba takes on a future form

The flow of energies passing through and around an evolving form

Relationships entwined as the threads of the Norse Norns weave a destiny

The liquids of making forming the plasma of connectedness

Animal possibilities 

Monkey takes his first steps

I have recently been using the form of a monkey to enact or represent myself within various drawn situations of imaginary encounters. The image above was the equivalent of the moment of embryogenesis of that idea. My thoughts about the invisible interior landscape of the body, coupled with a need to use other narrative forms, becoming for a moment fused together. In this image the exterior does at one point penetrate the interior, an idea I have developed further in other drawings, the fold can reveal the other side of a surface, whilst a torus can be a donut, a worm or a human body, all of which have contiguous insides that eventually become exterior surfaces.

My wife is a follower of Buddhism and she will sometimes remind me that many of the issues I struggle with have been thoroughly thought through by Buddhist monks many years ago. For instance in the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra by Shantideva, the image of the monkey is used as an analogy for the untrained and easily distracted human mind. The monkey represents a mind that is mischievous, restless and undisciplined, constantly leaping from one thought, sensation or desire to another. This undisciplined state is seen as a major obstacle on the path to enlightenment, but in my case it is a symbol that reminds me never to take what I do too seriously and that it is only in releasing and accepting my inner more intuitive animal, that I will find peace in my entangled relationships with the universe.

References

Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London, Routledge

Cook, L. S. (1887) Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation an Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts London: G. Redway

Deleuze, G. (2006) The Fold London: Continuum

Lipton, B. (2015) The Biology of Belief London: Hay House UK

Ruyler, R. (2019) The Genesis of Living Forms London: Rowman & Littlefield International

Yanagisawa, E (2017) The Fold. A Physical Model of Abstract Reversibility and Envelopment in 'The Dark Precursor, Deleuze and Artistic Research'. Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici. Orpheus Institute, Ghent. Leuven University Press  

See also:

Drawing as entanglements of life

What is embodiment?

Dream photography

Geometrical psychology and the fold

The weaving of grids

Paper, folding and the songs of trees

The split

Body auras

A linear enjambement 

Drawings for 1SSUE 59

At one point last year I was asked by the curator Frances Woodley if I would contribute to an artists' book project and as I like to challenge myself, thought it an interesting thing to get involved with. I had to come up with 20 images, all of which were to be folded in half when they were inserted and bound into the 20 artists' books that would result from the process. 

As is often the case with these things you were given a set of rules to follow and an introduction to the history of the project. The ongoing artists book project 1SSUE was initiated in 2002 by artist Richard Cox. Since then, its four rotating editors and artists, Richard Cox, Heather Parnell, Phil Mead and Hilary Wagstaff, have ensured that it has continued. 

Frances Woodley was the guest editor for 1SSUE 59, and it was in this role that she had contacted myself. 

Each artist had to make as many pages as there were participants (19), plus one. The pages are then collated and bound into artists’ books and then distributed to the participants. We were also informed that one copy of every edition of 1SSUE is housed in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.

1SSUE 59 had a theme that we were all to work to, it was the prefix ‘Re-’ as when used in front of a verb.

We were given some information about this:

‘Re-’ is derived from a Latin prefix, a root word meaning: “back, back from, back to the original place;” also ‘again, anew, once more,’ also conveying the notion of “undoing” or “backward,” . . .

‘’The many meanings in the notion of “back” give ‘re-’ its broad sense-range: “a turning-back; opposition; restoration to a former state; “transition to an opposite state.”

From the extended sense in “again,” ‘re-’ becomes “repetition of an action,” and in this sense it is extremely common as a formative element in English, applicable to any verb, and we were also given some examples. 

Guidelines also included some practical instructions.

Your page dimensions which have to be 25 h x 40 w cm exactly, with no rough/cut edges to the sides.

When folded, each side had to be 25 h x 20 w cm exactly and there was a drawing embedded into the instructions to make sure we understood what to do. 

Paper had to fold flat and not be too bulky. (240-350 gsm being recommended)

We were to work on one side of paper only. To use any medium (but nothing that stains, leaks, rubs or desiccates onto others’ work.) Artwork must be original. If printed, edition style, the design to be original to this 1SSUE.

All pages were to be sent to Frances by Friday 24 October 2025.

These are the pages I drew and sent off.

All the images were drawn with a black biro. I took the ‘RE’ theme very literally and simply sat down and drew black ballpoint pen marks over and over again, each time allowing whatever to come into being to suggest some form of collective human encounter. Then as small crowds of marks/people emerged, I would draw whatever it was they were encountering. 

 

We also had to decide on a title. I asked if possible to set the title in a range of sizes? Like so:

 

Black Ballpoint Human Marks: Drawn Again And Again And Again And Again

 

Finally we had to send website and social media addresses for inclusion in the ‘List of Artists’ and a postal address to which 1SSUE 59 was to be delivered. 

Hopefully you can see from the images how I tried to compositionally respond to the fact that each page would be folded in two. I realised as I drew the images how much I enjoyed drawing with a simple biro, you just have to let the drawing be as it needs to be, no adjustment, no clever mark making, just an idea and an image to carry it. I thought they made an interesting set of drawings and was slightly disappointed that as a set they would be immediately separated from each other and each drawing would have to fend for itself within whatever collective of images it found itself next to. This post is the only way they will ever be seen as a collection, so I will have to be content with that.

My copy of the final book arrived in a box and I now have it on a shelf in my studio.

1SSUE 59

The book is a fascinating format and deserves serious study as an object in its own right. As part of my job as a print technician back in the late 1970s I had to look at basic book binding, so am very aware of how much care must have gone into this aspect of putting these artists' books together. 

The spine and opening inserts

The spine of any book is a vital signifier. In this case the stitching is beautifully done and it conceptually links the interior to the exterior, thus unifying the project and signifying that all the various participants are being cared for.

Detail of the stitching

As you open the book, the significance of the spine is revealed, as it is an integral part of the opening experience, lying between the two opening inserts which are composed on the left of a stamp collection set into a transparent stamp album page and on the right each participating artist's titles for their various contributions, which are also set into the same transparent stamp album context. Suggesting that the contributors will be conserved and collected together carefully. 

My title as it appears set into the stamp album format

All of these design decisions go towards the construction of the artists' book as a unique object, that is not just a collection of artists' images stuck together, but which is a composite reflecting the 're' concept that artists had to respond to. 

As you open the book you realise that it is bound as a concertina or what is sometimes called a Leporello fold. 

1SSUE 59 opened out

The term 'Leporello fold' reminds us that there can be a far more performative engagement with the concertina form. You can engage much more of your body in its display; a realisation of this is seen at the moment in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, when Giovanni's manservant innumerates his master's infidelities, by reading from a list written on a concertina of paper, of the thousands of women Don Giovanni has seduced. This list takes up so much space that the manservant, Leporello, has had to write it on a piece of paper folded onto itself many times. During the opera this list written on a concertina fold is unfolded to great effect, the drama of the unfolding being so much more spectacular than it would have been if Leporello had kept a simple notebook. Hence the term a 'Leporello fold'. 

The reading of Leporello's List: Basso Marco Vinco in Don Giovanni

There are of course 19 participants, so therefore 19 double spreads of artists' works. There is no common style to the people involved and I was relieved to see that I was the only person to make a biro drawing but there was a fair amount of print and collage, which I was sort of expecting, as participation was about making multiples of images.

Sample pages from 1SSUE 59 

My own contribution when folded was I thought ok, but perhaps not the best of the images I drew, but I am usually the worst judge of my own stuff, so I wont worry too much about that.

My contribution: Biro drawing of repeated figures engaging with a burning head form

Don't ask me what it means because I don't know, I just started drawing repetitive figure type marks and the image gradually arrived. 

So begins a new year of posts on drawing related thoughts, this will be the 13th year that I have kept this blog, a fact that amazes me, as when I started it, it was an addition to my BA Fine Art Drawing strand teaching. Then the strand was dropped, I reduced my teaching hours, then I retired, left the university but eventually returned as a research fellow; each week though I have somehow nearly always managed to put up a post about something to do with drawing, although lately posts have had more to do with my own practice and less to do with the wider practice of drawing as a discipline. The longer I move away from my teaching role, the more I become involved with my own work, but after over 50 years teaching art, I will always have one eye on a student audience, many of which will be past students.

See also:

The ballpoint pen

Collaborative drawing

Leeds artists book fair