Shadow drawing

When we were children we all at one time or another tried out shadow drawing. I've reflected on several issues associated with this activity a few times already, but perhaps not quite got down to the essence as to why this way of drawing is so magical.

How to create shadow creatures

There is a wonderful moment when you put your hands together and begin making shapes in front of a direct light source, a moment when the shadow formed begins to look like the creature you had in your head. Hands become a bird flying or a dog's head or a rabbit, but at the same time, the shadow belongs to you. It is an extension of yourself that stretches out into the world, the shadow is both of you and something that you are trying to represent.
Some time ago I wrote and illustrated a short story, whereby a creature tried to cut away its shadow. It is a common story often about someone who tries to escape their dark side, or their subconscious selves, usually with disastrous consequences. Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." and 'The Fisherman and His Soul' by Oscar Wilde are typical examples.

Reattaching a Shadow, Peter Pan, Disney Studios, 1953

I first came across the idea as a boy on going to see Peter Pan; Disney's animated film enchanted me and after rewatching after many years, it still does.

The shadow has always fascinated me as someone who draws, because it is mythically part of drawing's history, as well as giving us physical information, such as where light is coming from, shadows can be used to construct a psychological context. Whenever we see shadows we “read” them and their very ambiguity can add drama or existential weight to the situation.

Rembrandt: Self portrait

By casting most of his face in shadow, Rembrandt suggests that he possesses a deeply complex personality, one that is hard to read, but powerful in its very ambiguity.

William Collins "Rustic Civility"

William Collins' painting "Rustic Civility", portrays the landowner only by the shadow he casts, suggesting that land ownership, casts a shadow over all who live on lands that are owned by others.

The cast shadows of tall buildings

When walking in the street we are very aware of the shadows cast by tall buildings, and feel cold as the sun is blocked from our view. If something is large enough to cast its shadow over us we can feel dominated or dwarfed by the presence of something so much bigger than ourselves. Conversely Lin Yutang stated, "When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set"; an aphorism that seems very apt at the moment. In fact the dictionary definition of to cast a shadow over something is "to spoil a good situation with something unpleasant".

I pointed out earlier that shadows are interwoven with the mythic history of drawing itself. Image making according to Pliny, began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow. This act was to lead eventually to the art of painting. He goes on to then describe how three dimensional modelling began and he states that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter. Pliny states that Butades invented this new art so that his daughter could remember the face of her lover, who was about to set off on a long journey. He drew in outline on the wall next to him the shadow of his daughter's lover. Then he carefully pressed clay around the interior of this outline and made it into a relief.  The emotive nature of the situation is embedded in that first shadow drawing, the painful moment of a lover’s departure is located in an image that sits between love and loss. Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, attached to the shadow from its very inception as an aid to drawing.   

Victor Stoichita in 'A Short History of the Shadow', points out the symbolic connection between “shadow, soul and a person’s double.” and goes on to state that ”this would indicate that the result of the collaboration between the potter and his daughter was the symbolic creation of a ‘living’ double, a surrogate figure difficult to understand without visualising the ritual actions we exert over it.” (The portrait was eventually taken to a temple and put on display there.)

Joseph-Benoît Suvée would make a painting of Pliny's thoughts about the invention of painting, this time though it is Butades' daughter tracing around the shadow of her loved one.

Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Butades or the Origin of Painting, 1791.

What this tracing around shadows is doing though is to create surrogates of real things and this creates a particular situation, whereby copies of reality start to become more substantial than reality itself. Butades' daughter's lover may be lost at sea, but his portrait could be seen for many years afterwards hanging in the temple. This situation is further complicated when we look at Plato's shadow metaphor. In his metaphor of the cave, he points out that we never actually see reality, only shadows of it. We are therefore forgetful of what reality is, and can confuse the real with the virtual, and in doing so we lead shadow lives of illusion. 

The image of how to create shadow creatures that I used to open this post, reminded me of how ancient and deep rooted is our relationship with other animals. Shamanic traditions include the harnessing of animal spirits as guides or messengers, and the shadow forms of animals, cast by humans are easily made by the light of a fire at night in a cave. Moving human shadows when seen alongside and cast over the top of some of the earliest painted images of animals, must have seemed as if they were interacting with those images, as well it seeming that forms were morphing from human to animal. I can still remember when I was a small child my grandfather making shadow creatures, and how magical the transformation of hands into animals seemed. I suspect there were artist shadow makers in neolithic times, who were very adept at casting the shadow forms of various animals and humans in iconic poses, onto the walls of caves. If only I could have been a fly on the wall and could watch, as they acted out ancient mythic scenarios in their shadow play.

As I weave these various threads together, it becomes clear that shadows are deeply significant and in their very insubstantiality in comparison to the things that they are cast from, they become like ghosts or spirits. Perhaps they gave to human beings their first way of visualising such things, after all, the dead can still cast a shadow and as the earth moves around the sun, that shadow will continue to move, even though the body will lie still. 

Sometimes shadows don't look like what casts them. The drawing above being a playful account of what was at one time a grudge match. 

Sometimes an image is itself meant to exist as a  shadow or ghost, the one below of my father mowing, was made in response to him dying of a stroke as he cut the lawn. He has always been able to cast a shadow in the form of a presence often felt in times of stress or difficulty, his critical gaze still falling on me as a long dark shadow, even as I type these words. 

Ghost mower

Shadows and related phenomena remind us of the uncanny and a world of 'the other', but being so 'everyday', they also remind us of the fact that these things are always with us. 

Reference:

Victor Stoichita (1997) A Short History of the Shadow London: Reaktion Books

See also:

Arvak  A short story

Shadows and the magic of transformation

Articulated collage and shadow play

Tone and emotional value

The vignette

Images as ghosts

The Join

I occasionally focus my attention on basic formal or material attributes that can become part and parcel of the physical structure of a drawing or any other artwork. Partly to emphasise the materiality of art and how its media specificity leads to material thinking and partly to show how any physical property can lead to a material metaphor. 

In our visual language, "joins" can refer to the way elements like lines, shapes, colours or textures are connected and interact to create meaning, but they can also be actual 'joins', lines along which one thing is joined to another. For instance the line of a weld, the line of a stitch or a hinge. These connections are both visual relationships between things that are brought together and symbolic relationships, representing ideas that emerge from the way we can think about how things can be connected with each other. 

Sometimes we use a specific material's property to join things together, such as the various glues and tapes that are available and there is a huge industry out there devoted exclusively to pursuing research in this area and at other times we try to join things without this third party and investigate the inherent properties of the materials we wish to join together to see what possibilities emerge. There is both a structural and philosophical difference between glueing two pieces of wood together and cutting and shaping two pieces of wood, so that they can be joined without any additional fixing. 

Japanese wood joinery

A combination of craftsmanship and a deep understanding of the material used leads to a particular mindset and philosophy that places great value on both awareness and respect for a material. There arises a calmness from the contemplation of a 'dance' of joining, that you can get as you follow in your mind the intricacies of Japanese wood joints. 

Japanese culture has a long history of philosophically considering the join. For instance the concept of Kintsugi, "joining with gold", that involves repairing broken ceramics with lacquer and highlighting the joins made with gold, a concept that validates and honours the idea of repair, as something that adds value. This is very different to the concept of built in obsolescence, that leads to a throwing away and replacement with new, of things that are regarded as broken. 

Joining two different materials together can be done in different ways and the appearance after joining can be very different. 

Adhesive Bonding uses a substance that undergoes a chemical or physical reaction to form intermolecular bonds between itself and the surfaces being joined. You need to ensure that the two surfaces meet each other firmly along a clean overlapping area and you may need to allow time for the chemical reaction to take place. In drawing the main use of adhesive bonding is in assembling collages, but as has been highlighted in past blog posts, various tapes, such as duct tape and masking tape, can be used to both make joins and draw out forms at the same time. Glues also have different properties, 'Mod Podge' for instance is often used by artists because of its different possible surface 'finishes'. If you want to look at an artist that uses adhesives creatively, Mark Bradford is an excellent person to follow, his collages join together all sorts of papers and found surfaces and he uses industrial materials similar to silicone-based sealants, which give flexibility to his surfaces as well as a type of painterly presence. The joining together of various elements taken from his environment has ensured that his work is socially grounded, even though at first sight the work may look as if it is an abstract image. 

Mark Bradford: The devil is beating his wife: Collage

Mechanical fastening can be an area that leads to all sorts of visual invention. For instance clamping methods can be used to join any two paper surfaces, and to do this you might end up drilling holes or creating bent wire or using rivets, staples or paper clips. The nature of mechanical fastening means that the materials often need a considerable overlap in order to be joined, and this overlap can be a visually exciting edge. 

A visual field of a particular quality can be evolved using any mechanical fastening

Stitched joins rolled up in ink and printed off as monoprints

Once a joint has been made using mechanical means it will be much more physically visual, therefore its visual properties can be further investigated, as in the case above, where stitched together papers were then used to make monoprinted surfaces. 

The joint made by a spiralling wire that forms the spine of a sketchbook

The most common physical and visual paper joint we see everyday in the studio is the spiral binding of sketchbooks. It feels like a backbone to me and when I'm making drawings of how back pain might feel, I will often show someone the sketchbook spine, to see if they too feel this way. 

Various paper fasteners

Every one of these fasteners if used as a form of repeated unit to make a joint, will produce a very particular visual line. A simple change in pin type for instance, such as a plastic headed as opposed to a steel headed one, changes the visual rhythm.

The line of pins develops a particular visual quality as fabric and thin paper are joined

We use the joins in clothing to tell interesting stories about the garments we wear and to highlight parts of the body that the clothes relate to. For instance, as a material nears an edge, when there is the need to 'finish' off or end a section of fabric, we often see a change in direction of the material's granular sub-structure. For instance a shirt cuff. 

Shirt cuff

In order to both stop the material fraying and to imply 'this visual movement stops here', the cuff is made with a change in the direction of the fabric, placing the stripes in this case at right angles to each other. Visually we feel there is a rightness, the direction of our gaze doesn't slip off the end of the sleeve and the hand is visually put on a plinth, or presented by the cuff. One piece of fabric is joined to another and this fact is highlighted by the change of stripe direction. The most startling use of this idea being of course the ruff, a formal element that presents the head and creates a visual full stop to the garments below it. 

Van Dyke: Man wearing a wheel ruff

Another way that joins are highlighted in garment manufacture, is by seam placement. By strategically placing seams, both structural form and aesthetic function are controlled by fashion designers. Buttons are another way of joining two surfaces together, and visually they slow the read down, providing a series of linked full stops.

Cloth edges, stitched and with buttons

When we see these joins in our clothing, we recognise their importance, the edging being vital to our perceptual understanding of the situation. Not long ago there was a fashion for having open seams that ran around the edges of knitted garments, therefore highlighting rather then hiding the structural form of the clothes. This felt as if the wearer was trying to say something about truthfulness and that they were not trying to hide anything. 

This visual recognition also operates when we look at a sheet of paper. The deckle signifies that there is an edge to the material and it also operates as a reminder of the paper's manufacturing process. 

Deckle edge

However we rarely develop the possibilities that the joint offers us, both physically and metaphorically. The term "line of join" might also be used in a more figurative sense, perhaps referring to a line of demarcation, a dividing line, or a point where two things come together. On a map the line along which two countries touch is usually seen as a dividing line or line of demarcation, but is it too much of a conceptual leap to think of that line as the place where people join together?

When I used to teach on the Foundation course at Leeds, one exercise we used to do was to divide a sheet of A1 paper into four equal parts and then to make one image that was made of four different visual languages, that butted against each other at the lines of division. For instance the first section might be drawn using a pointillist technique, the second expressive charcoal, the third flat colour and the fourth watercolour washes. The final images if done well, seemed to slip in and out of different time zones, the overall image gave them coherence, but the visual fractures that happened as languages changed, caused some sort of temporal confusion.  

Joining different visual languages

The bringing together of different visual languages to create an image that they can all be part of, can also be used to suggest that there might be something that underlies our differences and that beneath our first perception, something more fundamental is in place.  

One way this sort of join has been used to stimulate the imagination is in exquisite corpse drawings. 

Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy and Max Morise: Exquisite corpse

It's great to see several different minds united in one image, the joins linking the ideas together, as well as the line of join making sure each personality has its own space within which to operate. The formal change in direction we see when a cuff is made for a shirt, is now a conceptual change in direction as one artist's viewpoint butts up against another's. 

But these joins are also folds. 

A fold can be seen as a type of breaking into two parts, what was formally one pure, unblemished surface, such as when you fold a sheet of paper in half. But like the join, it too has many physical properties and metaphorical associations. The line of the join and the line of the fold are closely linked, but the one implies two different things being linked and the other implies one continuous surface being divided into two contiguous surfaces, so I will reserve thoughts about the fold for another post. 

The join and the fold are closely related to the split and the tear, issues I have dealt with in the past and that are integral threads to an unfolding of my thoughts around these things, so do if interested follow the links at the end of this post.

See also:

The split

The tear

Tapes

Edges

Paper

Knots

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Mark Bradford

A highway code for pain

In an earlier post 'Lines in the road' I stated, "The meanings that have been encoded into the directions for road users are meant to be easy to learn, and it might be interesting to think about how as an artist you could devise various keys for the symbolic use of lines that include emotional and cultural readings that go far beyond the everyday language of the Highway Code. It has taken me some time to get around to responding to the implications of my own thoughts, but I'm getting there.

I have been working in a spinal injuries unit of a local hospital and working with patients to explore how pain and its emotional associations can be visualised. Gradually I have been developing a pain chart that is becoming that emotional highway code I was thinking about back when I wrote that post about road markings. 

Existing pain scale

The present pain diagram that is the highway code for the medical profession is the one above.  

Highway code road markings

Pain and its perception is an interoceptual experience, one I would argue that is far more complex than the experience of driving that is associated with the system of road marking that we need to learn. When learning to drive we have to take both a theory and a practical test, often spending months of repeated activities, both on the road and sat in front of a screen or book, looking at and trying to memorise what all the different road signs are. In contrast when you have had an accident, often on the very roads, that you spent a long time learning to negotiate, you might be taken into hospital and be asked to use a pain chart to explain the level of your perception of pain. No wonder both patients and clinical staff find these charts of very little use. 

The beginnings of a new pain chart

I decided therefore to develop my own pain chart in response to what I was learning from patients as to how they felt we could visually symbolise their various feelings about their existing pain levels. The first issue was the fact that for most people pain is something that is a temporal experience, it is either continuous, episodic, getting worse or getting better. It is also something that has a certain quality, it can be sharp, throbbing, prickly, stabbing or a strange type of numbness. I can also be something that is static or something that moves, either focused on a particular spot in the body, or travelling along an arm or a leg. It is also something that can be at times the thing that takes over all the awareness that you have, being so painful that you can think of nothing else, but at other times it can become something in the background, always there but often forgotten. 

Pain chart: Stage two: After critique from patients

Pain is also something bound up with emotion. Sometimes pain can be exhilarating and can drive you on to exert yourself even more, or it can be emotionally debilitating and can drain all your enthusiasm for life away. Pain can feel like an annoyance, but that feeling may itself over time eventually lead to anger. Therefore several aspects of pain and its emotional landscape may be in evidence at the same time. It might feel as if it is a grinding pain, that is dull but also very warm. You might feel as if you have accepted this pain for some time and are pretty calm about it, or you may be becoming more and more alarmed about it. 

Pain is something that exists in the mind, for instance you may have pain in a phantom limb, but that pain will be as real as it would be in an actual limb. It is therefore a very complicated phenomenon, associated with how we build an awareness of our bodies but at the same time, not of our bodies, but entwined into our embodied mind. Engrained into my own body schema I have a story from my childhood that perhaps illustrates how these things work. Back in the early 1950s I used to stay with my grandparents for quite long periods of time, so I got to know them very well and was involved with their lives. They lived in a village that lay on the outskirts of the industrial west midlands, a place that has long since been incorporated into the expanding town of Dudley but which was then somewhere that felt quite rural in comparison to the town where my parents lived. When a young boy I had a terrible difficulty working out my left from my right and was constantly confused as to which was which, however I then had an experience that forever fixed the difference into my mind/body. I had developed a carbuncle in the crook of my arm, it was huge, or seemed to be so at the time and I couldn't bend my arm. My gran was very adept at making healing poultices and made one for me, surrounding my arm in a strange concoction that included bitumen and mustard, but which on removal after a few days had done its work. The pain was however now somehow fixed into my mind and ever since then, if I have to think of my left, I feel something in the crook of my left arm, not any more a pain, but a definite sensation, a feeling that singles that very area out as being different to the rest of my body and being forever associated with an idea of left-ness. This very small incident, is still engrained in my mind's idea of my body, an idea that is constructed over time of innumerable similar incidents, from stubbed toes to broken bones, from itchy legs to old wounds, from loving touches to received blows, which is why it is such an emotive body schema or map. The decision for instance to have a tonal scale that goes from dark/heavy to light was an attempt to respond to this, a wound for instance may leave a dark memory that weighs you down, but a recollection of the feeling of kiss may be a light thing, the memory of which buoys you up. I feel that this is still something that is very crude and raw but its for myself a gradual journey, one that is mainly driven by making drawings, but I still spend some time looking for other models that emerge from time to time from alternative fields of research, such as psychology.

I like a good diagram and have recently come across Russel's circumflex model of affect, that sets out the emotions around a circle in a similar way to a colour circle. Pain is also something that is nearly always linked to emotions, therefore Russel's diagram is another ingredient I will in future try to embed into the mix.

Reproduced from “Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect,” by L. Feldman Barrett and J.A. Russell, 1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(4), p. 970

Russell suggested that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an emotional stimulus and the extent of its activation or amplification are independent, bipolar dimensions. Therefore happy and sad are seen as opposites in terms of the unpleasant/pleasant quality of feeling tone and calm and alert are put at the opposite ends of the activation dimension. A mixed emotion is often composed of feelings that relate to each other on the same side of the circle, such as happy and relaxed or happy and excited. These dimensions I am starting to think can be linked up with the emotional mapping of lines as researched by Hu, Lyu and Liu (2021), but that's something for another day, after I have had time to see how my own emotional lines map onto theirs.

References:

Feldman Barrett, L. and Russell, J.A. (1998) Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(4), p. 970 Available at: https://psu.pb.unizin.org/psych425/chapter/circumplex-models/

Hu, Y., Lyu, R. and Liu, X., 2021. Is the emotional mapping of lines caused by the motion they imply?. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the cognitive science society (Vol. 43, No. 43). Available at: https://escholarship.org/content/qt3gp9g012/qt3gp9g012_noSplash_80573abf8f3e99f51d0e3784aff2d80f.pdf

Ural, D.G., Aceves Sepúlveda, G. and Riecke, B.E., 2025, July. Who Defines Embodiment? Cultural Bias in Interoceptive Wellness Technologies. In Companion Publication of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 363-368).Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3715668.3736349

See also:

Lines in the road

Seeing and feeling

Measuring emotions and colour

Is drawing a language?
Angles vision and sound

The emotional line

Drawings of nervous systems

Part of a vertical-transverse section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major. 

I have recently discovered Camillo Golgi's Drawings of nervous systems. They are both beautiful and sublime. Golgi was faced with a difficult problem, how could he begin to see the cell structure within nervous tissue, as these cells were so tightly packed that if you tried to stain them in order to see them, you simply produced an un-analysable blob. No structural detail or lines of interconnection could be picked out. The axon and dendrites of neurons, the thin filamentary extensions of neural cells, were too thin to take up the stains that had been used in the past. However Golgi's method was to use a substance that would only stain a limited number of random cells. Using his method, dendrites, as well as the cell soma, are clearly stained for their entire length, which allowed him to visualise the complex networking structures of many parts of the brain. Interestingly it is silver nitrate, the key ingredient in early photography, that is central to this discovery. Because only random neurons were stained, it was much easier to see them, and then Golgi could speculate how they would collectively come together to determine their total structure. This reminded me of one of my first drawing classes at college on Wolverhampton, we were told to look at the situation with squinted eyes, and shown that in cutting down on the amount of light coming through to us, it was easier to see what we were looking at as details were eliminated.

Pes Hippocampi major

Part of a vertical section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major

In reality there would not be as much space around each nerve, but by giving each one its own space, a very convincing series of images were produced, images that allow us to 'see' what is going on, in our minds.

If you pull away from this microscopic view of the nervous system, as in the video 'Powers of ten', you begin to see the brain itself as an organ. Golgi's sections are located in specific areas of the body's brain landscape, just as a stand of trees might be located in a map of Yorkshire, that is itself to be found within a map of England. 

Inferior and posterior cornua, viewed from above. (Pes. hipp. labeled at center top.)

From Grey's Anatomy 

As the body organs are isolated from their position within a body, it is as if they become creatures in their own right, the poetic inhabitants of an ecosystem, that have at some point been captured and stuffed for scientific examination.

Corpus callosum

The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. It allows the two sides of the brain to communicate and coordinate signals. The 'O' on the drawing above indicates where the pes hippocampi lies; a location that when I saw it in the illustration above, made me think of a type of lure, its position within the drawing reminding me of the thaumatichthys, the trapjaw anglerfish, that has a bioluminescent lure located inside its mouth. This 'wonder fish' lives in the deepest parts of our oceans, inhabiting a dark so far away from the surface that if any creature was to signify the inhabitants of our deep subconscious, this would be it. 

Illustration from the Ocean World

As we move in and out of the body, it is as if we are moving through a landscape with strange inhabitants. The organs and microscopic fibres illustrated above, are as much a product of an artist's imagination as they are a materialisation of a set of embodied functions and could, if we are not trained as medics, be anything and without labels, for myself they become 'free floating signifiers', things that suggest organic form, but whose functions I can only guess at; however  their poetic function is what I'm more interested in, together with their possibilities for imaginative invention. 

Please forgive my rambling mind, it is I know trying to get me somewhere, but as is often the case by a strange route. So do try to follow me as I attempt to make my next connection. In his paper on the biological bases out of which shamanism evolved, Winkelman (2004) argues that shamanism was the original neurotheology. Because, he argued, shamanism manifested itself all across the world, in many cultures and times, many of which could never have known each other; it was most likely that shamanic type thinking, has a biological foundation. He goes on to state that the brain has within it neurognostic structures, (the initial, inherited organisation of neural models from which more developed models grow) based on neural networks that shape basic forms of perception and that these structures also involve innate processing and representation modules that may underlie the reasons why we developed religion. He then goes on to state that animism uses innate representation modules that are deeply involved in how we understand our ideas of self and others, concluding with an idea that there is such as thing as a “natural history intelligence,” that uses an innate capacity 'for representing animal species to form metaphoric personal and social identities based in animals', (p. 210). But now we get to the nub of what I was interested in. After arguing that our bodies provide a neurological basis for human experience and knowing, he cites Newton 1996 and Friedrich 1991 in developing an idea that metaphors and analogic thinking, such as soul flight involve body image, therefore our symbol systems are derived from neurognostic models for organising both internal and external experiences (Citing Laughlin 1997). Sociocultural influences are still powerful shapers but he argues, 'universal body-based representational capacities combine memory, perception, affect, and cognition in an image-based symbolic information system'. (Winkelman 2004 p. 200)

Winkelman's paper made me think again about how my interests were perhaps more joined up that I had previously believed. I had been thinking of some sort of visual poetry, that could be developed that might link up my interests in animism and interoceptual representation. In particular sometimes shamans, such as those who operated within indigenous cultures of North America, used buffalo robes as part of their transformational rituals. Clothing yourself in the skin of another, being an excellent way to channel the other creature's spirit into yourself.

Shaman's buffalo robe

A body suit/ drawing made to explore the idea of an interoceptual self-portrait

In the image above, when it is activated by my presence, my head is positioned to peer through from the other side of the drawing, replacing the existing cardboard surrogate head, (top right). I stand where the two shoes are. Once I am in place, I deliver a monologue about the relationship between my emotional state and how I think about my body. Within the body suit/drawing are inserts and they are my responses to Camillo Golgi's drawings. I have no access to microscopes or other similar technology, so have to work with visual analogies instead. If you wet an area of paper with clear water and then dip an ink loaded brush into it to draw, you will immediately see a fine network of watery threads spread out from your drawn lines. These have become for myself part of my drawing's nervous system, visually operating like organs and as a conjoined nervous system at the same time. 

An 'organ' detail from the drawing above

I'm working with two other artists on this aspect of my research and they will draw from the situation I set up in my studio, which will be made up of three or four situations similar to the one above. They will respond to what I have been doing, just as I will respond to what they have done, by making drawings. The drawings will operate as a form of communication between artists who are operating for at least a little while as shamans, whereby we see what can be passed on and what can be reinvented, in relation to the specific issues on the ground where each artist lives.

As Manvir Singh states in his book, 'Shamanism, The timeless religion', "We are all endowed with the same cognitive architecture,", (2025, p. 12), his argument being that shamanic practices reflect the way we are wired to think and that they reoccur in different guises over and over again throughout human history. The other day I was making coiled snail type creatures, based on an object I saw in a museum in Malta. They are designed to operate as votives for gardeners suffering an influx of slugs. We all need to believe that there is some way of making our wishes come true, one of these being that if only the slugs would go away, my garden would prosper. I tap into that wish and as I do I would like to think that I hold onto an invisible link that goes back thousands of years to those first artists who made images to intercede between the known and the unknown, a history that includes Camillo Golgi, as much as it does the "Sorcerer" from the cave of Les Trois-Frères.

Slug votive

References

Singh, M., (2018) Why is there shamanism? Developing the cultural evolutionary theory and addressing alternative accounts. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 2018;41:e92. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002230

Singh, M. (2025) Shamanism: The Timeless Religion London: Alan Lane

Winkelman, M., (2004) “Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 39(1), 193–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2004.00566.x

See also:

The macro and the micro (Includes a link to the video 'Powers of ten')

Drawing feet

Drawing together science and myth

Paper and skin

What can art do?

Pilates and Interoception

The inner body as a psychic form

I have for the past few months been undertaking pilates exercises. These have helped me to get more in touch with my body and to teach myself about myself. Each week as I go through a set of controlled exercise routines, I am gradually, very slowly, increasing my ability to control my body. In Pilates, students, like myself, are taught to employ the repetition of specific movement skills, and gradually through repetition, hopefully the brain will also rewire itself, as a more body aware organ. This hopefully will develop my neuromuscular synapses, and lead to a heightened body awareness and therefore more precise body/joint/muscle control, something that I am testing out by playing more and more table tennis.

One example is the fact I often experience lower back pain. I have realised that I have trouble sensing the position of my pelvis in its body space and find it hard to differentiate the movement of my pelvis from my spine or distinguish the movement of my hip joint from my spine. I am slowly becoming aware that I can more precisely activate my core and I am sensing the fact that gradually I can take control of an inner set of relationships, that previously I wasn't even aware of.

My trainer/teacher gets me to make certain movements over and over again, their repetition has helped me to internalise certain movement skills, an ability that I am beginning to see as being essential for my lower back health. I see this development as fostering improved communication between my brain and my body, which should also eventually result in more resilient muscles and an increased capacity to sustain effort over an extended period; again I am trying to test these things out by playing table tennis. For instance how quickly I react to changes in incoming stimulus or how long I can sustain a certain level of bodily concentration.

All of which I am of course then trying to bring into my visualisation of interoception research. I am trying to approach the issue from several angles at once, putting myself and my feeling tone, at the centre of the process. I cant really ask others to believe in what I'm doing, if I am not prepared to undertake an investment in the full possibilities that begin to open up, as I continue to explore the relationship between my inner body and my outer psyche in relation to the way that my outer body hosts my inner psyche. The folding that I feel takes place, seems rather like a Klein Bottle, my insides becoming my outsides, my facial signalling reflecting my stomach feelings and my mind reflecting my body. 

Studies for body mind awareness

The animation I'm working on tries to deal with these issues and at times it represents feelings trapped inside the body, at other times the body becomes a landscape and then we slip between the body and its interior organs and the feeling tones or sensations that make up the emotive landscape that emerges from the physical release of hormones into the bloodstream. 

The images above eventually become embedded into ideas for a body moving within a body. The 'trunk' being a totally separate organ, seen as an idea rather than as some sort of anatomically accurate image. 

Four versions of a trunk, ready to be animated

Body parts to be attached to a trunk

As I begin to put the animation together, the process will like all my other drawing activities, eventually begin to tell me what it is becoming about. This finding clarity in the muddle of doing, is I'm afraid my most valued methodology, but it is not one that sits very well within the established research list of approaches to attaining new knowledge.

However here is a first indication of what the interior somatic feelings are looking like.

The growing awareness of a pain emerging

In the image above, I'm trying to fuse a shape of a pain with an emotive reading of a response to it. The landscape itself is a fusion of two sets of drawings, one of local woods and another of mountains of slag drawn from memory. It is movement that tells us something is alive and active, a throbbing pain, being as alive as a flying bird, all inhabiting the biological ecosphere. 

The animated gif image below is an indication of how the trunk and body parts will come together. I was initially going to hand make all the parts of the animation and had already made a few cutout puppets, jointed with paper fasteners, but Doctor Simpo, an old friend and animator as well as comic maker and many other things, suggested that he could digitally animate the figure for me. This is his test, to see how the figure sits against the background. 

As the figure moves through the body/landscape it talks to itself, using a language that has been constructed from sounds made as people respond to different feelings, see Sound sample

The object in the frame that looks a bit like a helmet with two horns, is what I termed a psychic infuser, it is where life energies can be piped into the ground from living creatures, in this case birds attempt to breath life into the landscape. You can get a better idea of how that works from the image below, which is a colour test, to see how orange would sit against the blues. I'm yet to animate the birds properly, as they need to be redrawn. 

As I return to pilates, I will continue to use the experience to visualise a somatic awareness of the body in motion, alongside trying to represent the feeling tone that I have as I emotionally think about my ageing abilities to move. Therefore the visualisation of emotional feelings has to be coupled with 'invented' body forms, something that is also being developed by another related project that has emerged from the meetings I occasionally have with artists that worked with myself on 'The Body I am in' online project. I am in the middle of a new project directed by myself, but with growing interventions and ideas from the other participants, whereby three of us are working to develop body costumes to help externalise internal feelings but there is so much going on there that it will need a post to itself to communicate what is happening. Hopefully, this work will begin to fuse with all my other projects, such as the work at Pinderfields Hospital, and I will begin to see what it is I'm actually doing. 

References:

K. Caldwell, M. Adams, R. Quin, M. Harrison, J. Greeson. 2013. Pilates, mindfulness and somatic education, J. Dance Somat. Pract. 5 (2):141.

See also:

Fine art animation

Drawing and mindfulness

Drawing and healing

Visualising energy flow

The embodied diagrams of Nicholas Gansterer

Drawing correspondence: The Body I am in