Past, present and future

A while ago I had a badge made, it was a very simple idea but for myself at the time it represented something fundamental. Time appears to flow from the known past, to the present and onwards to an unknown future. But not all cultures have seen time in this way.
For instance, the indigenous Māori concept of time known as wā, is non-linear.  Their experience of time is of a continuous unfolding whereby the living exist alongside their ancestors, making history and the present contiguous. This has been described as spiralling time, which is in constant, expansive motion. Whilst in the Amazon rainforest, the Pirahã tribe live with an unbroken sense of the immediate present. Their language lacks a past tense entirely and they do not have a sense of history or future-past constructs. For them, time is not a sequence of past, present, future, but an immediate condition of things as they are. 

In quantum physics the past, present, and future also exist at the same time. The block universe theory, as supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, describes a four-dimensional block, whereby space and time combine into the single four-dimensional structure of spacetime. The feeling of time moving is just how humans experience it; yesterday, today and tomorrow are all equally real, much like different locations exist even if you cannot see them.

The Block Universe

There is also a cyclical view of time.  Cyclical patterns of change are often embedded into mythologies, especially because we live on a planet that revolves, thus setting up an idea of constant return. Day follows night, autumn follows summer, spring follows winter. However, some cultures have much longer or more cosmic ideas of time than others, such as the Taoist idea of "the blue sea becomes mulberry fields". 

In the ancient Taoist text 'Shenxian Zhuan', compiled by the Eastern Jin dynasty scholar Ge Hong in the 4th century, a story is told by the immortals that illustrates how immense the passage of time can be. 
When the immortal Wang Fangping asks another immortal, Magu to visit, she notes that since they last met, the celestial eastern sea has already turned into mulberry fields. In the story Magu explains that she looked down and saw that the sea had dried up and transformed into farmland and she suspects it will soon turn back into an ocean again. This idea of vast cyclical change is used to describe massive, sweeping and irreversible transformations that happen over far longer spans of time than human lives. 

I also had to think about colour. The combination of blue, green and purple is an analogous colour scheme, i. e. the colours are adjacent to each other within a colour wheel. The tonality of each colour is adjusted so that each value is similar, a series of choices which I hoped would create a calm, harmonious feeling.

I was at the same time aware of colour symbology, but I did not try to fix anything, except to be cognisant of blue in my mind standing for calm, peace and spirituality, green for nature, growth, and renewal and purple for wisdom, and creativity, but I did not want to label these, as each culture has its own colour symbology. 

The spiral form is one often used to represent spiritual transformation; it represents a cycling closer to higher consciousness over time, as well as mimicking natural patterns found in galaxies, shells, whirlwinds, and whirlpools.

My badge is small, my attempt in as compact a form as possible, to form a doorway into thinking about these things. I still have some left and give them away as a reminder that art does not have to be massive or grand in order to be effective. If you would like one e mail me on garry.barker@leeds-art.ac.uk

See also:

Robert Morris: Blind time drawings

Time and drawing

More thoughts on drawing time

Portraits and time

The spiral

Drawing the multitudes within us

Interoceptual portrait

The phrase, "I am large, I contain multitudes" is taken from Walt Whitman's famous poem 'Song of Myself'. It is a beautiful celebration of human complexity, meaning we all possess multifaceted, often contradictory personalities and emotions that evolve over time. 

I contain multitudes: Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan would more recently follow in Whitman's footsteps, constructing a song that is also a meditation on personal identity seen as a complex mix of contradictions, history and shifting roles, rather than a single, fixed persona. I've become very aware of this as I make interoceptual portraits. People are not fixed identities, their feelings swirl around and one day the feeling tone I'm trying to realise is one particular shape or colour and on another day it changes. Whether this is a change in myself or in the person I'm thinking about I'm not sure, but change is happening and the interpersonal communication is shifting as I attempt to follow or grasp that change using drawing or colour. On the outside we may look the same but inside we are constantly morphing, or at least it seems like this to me. This situation is compounded by the fact that our surrounding social structures are also changing; Zygmunt Bauman in 'Liquid Modernity' describes our contemporary society, as one where all social structures, relationships and institutions are constantly morphing into new formats and concepts. 

For the DC comic Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison and the artist Richard Case invented the character Crazy Jane, the dominant alternate personality of the character Kay Challis. The idea that Morrison and Case were trying to work with was to construct a character who had dissociative identity disorder, in this instance, a person with a total of 64 unique identities. When I was reading Doom Patrol, Crazy Jane was the dominant alter ego or host. They were playing I thought at the time a dangerous game, as in order for this character to be so disturbed, she had had to have had a previous life of deep trauma. This emerged as a story of childhood abuse, and although I could see where Morrison was going with this, it still felt awkward. He was interested in the brain's psychic power. He was also interested and I presume still is, in magic. The magician's ability to seek power over things by using sympathetic magic, involves the transforming of spiritual energy into different forms, so that it can 'inhabit' a fetish or other magical object. This overlaps it seems to me with the power of an art object to hold within it an externalised thought. This boundary or edgeland, being a territory not unlike the wall of the shaman's cave. I have been looking at paleopoetry as an idea recently; pre-linguistic thinking and the split between our old and new brains. The old brain being able to intuitively grasp thoughts without the need for logic. This old brain is still with us and magical thinking is perhaps something that can harness it, leaving the more recent one to worry about what happened. The unconscious is a minefield and one artists have often gone into without any safeguards, because it seems to offer answers that sit totally outside current ideas of how the world ought to behave. It is at times like these that logic seems to fail us. Powerful forces seem at work that are nothing to do with rational thought. I can see why during the first world war Dada came into being; logic seemed to have failed the world, so artists had to turn to illogic or ways of working that owed nothing to the processes of thinking that had led to carnage and the death of millions. 

Although I was worried by Morrison and Case's idea, at the same time it fascinated me and still does. I suspect Morrison and Case had seen 'The Three Faces of Eve'. Christine Costner Sizemore was an American woman who, in the 1950s, was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder. Her diagnosis became the kernel around which the character 'Eve' was developed for the book and 1957 film. In the film, Eve White a timid, self-effacing woman goes to see a psychiatrist and while there, a "new personality", the wild, fun-loving Eve Black, emerges. Eve Black knows everything about Eve White, but Eve White is unaware of Eve Black. The film depicts Dr. Luther's attempts to understand and deal with these two faces of Eve. Under hypnosis at one session, a third personality emerges, a relatively stable woman but with no name and little memory of her past. She chooses to take the name Jane. who remembers a traumatic event in Eve's childhood. This event had led to the creation of her different personalities. Following this recollection, Jane remembers her entire past and believes the other personalities are gone. During my 1950s comic reading there was also another fictional character who on a daily basis operated as if he had a split personality and that was Superman/Clark Kent. The mild mannered reporter who in a moment could change into the hero, Superman; a split that has been represented as the tension between our private vulnerabilities and our public responsibilities and before that we had Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a tale about the struggle between the good and evil living inside every single person. 

Two Face: Matt Wagner design for DC Comics

In the DC franchise Batman comics, 'Two-Face' employs a similar good/evil duality, but this time the duality is plain to see, as his exterior appearance reflects how his interior personality has changed.

The popularity of these characters, I believe reflects our own awareness of having to contain multitudes. I am a 76 year old man with failing knees, but that doesn't stop me in my head, scoring a great goal for West Bromwich Albion, as they go on to win the FA Cup. For a brief moment I am a recreated Jeff Astle, the last man to score a cup final goal for the Albion. One day I can be a positive, outward going creative and the next day an inward looking, tired has-been. I'm interested, I'm bored, I'm lethargic, I'm excited, I'm drunk, I'm sober, I'm frightened of the future, I'm positive about where everything is going, I'm lonely, I'm nervous of crowds, I'm in love, I'm cold hearted, I'm all of these things and many more, so what does an honest portrait of myself look like? 

Interoceptual portraits

Not a pretty sight, but perhaps they do touch a certain nerve. Our unconscious selves are hard to control, we may think our conscious minds lead the way, but if this is the case why are so many people across the world fighting each other, accusing each other of wrongs, responding to slights that are often imaginary, beginning wars because of rumour and attacking people because of some sort of perceived difference and undertaking weaponised behaviour to justify harm. We sure are messed up. 

Maybe we are all more like Crazy Jane than we would like to think. 

Crazy Jane as envisioned by Richard Case

As Whitman put it, amongst many other lines;

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,

Whitman's words are a reminder to beware of that best selfie shot, because that is not you. Neither is the winning painting in that portrait competition, so many avidly watch on Sky television. Beware of a good likeness of whatever personality is sent out to have their portrait painted; it is unlikely to have captured anything of their inner reality. A frozen moment of an external appearance may be captured, but we all know we have a 'good side' and a 'bad side' and if our thought dreams could be seen, as Bob put it, they would probably put our heads in a guillotine and how do we capture all of that in one image?

Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity London: Polity

Whitman, W. (2016) Song of myself: with a complete commentary. University of Iowa Press.

See also:

What is a portrait anyway?

Self portrait drawings

The portrait as stereotype  

The portrait as witness and control

Portraits and time

Portraits mass and time

The Lamed Vavniks 

Visualising pain

Visualising pain

Headache

Finding forms with which to visualise pain is not as easy as you might think. For one person a jagged yellow may feel exactly right as a visual translation of their headache but for someone else it doesn't work at all. Perhaps there is no universal correlation between a pain and a visual form and if not why am I working in this area? I think it's because there is some correlation, some instinctual connection between a pain and a shape, but not one that can be pinned down into a grid of references that allows us to see a throbbing pain as one form and a sharp pain as another. Perhaps it is also because the more I work with people I realise that it is not the images that I produce with them being accurate representations of pain or other somatic feelings that are the most important thing, it is rather the process of forward and backward iterations of change and adjustment in response to conversations, and the record of this that is important. During this process people become more aware of their feelings and as they do, something happens in their mental life that allows in change, something new begins to work its way into neural pathways and possibilities begin to open out. The forms discovered therefore represent 'possibilities' and are open to interpretation, rather than them being dictionary like fixed readings. The images are more about visualising the human condition of being always unsure as to how other humans receive our complex communications. We feel certain things about life and our consciousness of it but we might also feel that only our own mind is certain to exist and that we are locked inside our own subjective experiences. In philosophy this is called solipsism and is to do with the problem of other minds, the emotional realisation of this being sometimes seen as a form of existentialism. However, I'm a believer in intersubjectivity, not just amongst people but in a pan-creation intersubjectivity and believe that consciousness and meaning do not originate inside my own individual brain, but are collectively co-created across the entire relational and environmental fabric of existence. Therefore altruism is of vital importance to me, not just in terms of the value I put on the existence and welfare of others but on my awareness and value of our interconnectedness with everything else. In having conversations and responding to them through drawing, the images that evolve are for myself, a materialised realisation of these ideas.

In an earlier post on decor art, I was ruminating on the fact that surveys had found that people did not like certain shapes and colours in paintings and that perhaps spiky shapes, sharp, jagged and angular forms reminded us of aggression and pain, because they resemble thorns, teeth, or claws and these forms therefore possibly trigger primitive survival instincts and raise alertness. I also stated that harsh, bright colours, high-contrast hues and highly saturated colours demand immediate attention, as psychologically they represent warning signs, urgency, and intensity. However there would be a very different response to these forms when experienced as part of a fireworks display. How we would then emotionally react to those fireworks, would though depend on our current mental state. When we were hosting a Ukrainian couple, a boy and his mother, who had come over to England to escape the war, we had not thought about this. When a firework display began in our local Sikh temple, the boy hid under a table, the loud bangs signifying for him immediate danger. Someone suffering from PTSD may well find the experience of fireworks frightening and disorientating but most people who have been introduced to fireworks within calm, family orientated situations, are able to get an uplifting mental excitement from the experience.

For myself, watching fireworks triggers a feeling of awe, which creates a space for me to enter the sublime, a state that blends wonder with a thrilling touch of terror. Unlike traditional beauty, the sublime challenges and humbles us. In the case of fireworks, the emotional state that arises, combines visual stimulation from bright, dynamic colours with the sudden, thrilling crack of loud bangs; leading to a temporary state of euphoria and excitement. From their stunning colours to their thunderous booms, fireworks trigger reactions that are emotional and instinctive.

A certain class of fireworks that I come across, especially during large scale organised firework displays, tends to evoke a more complex series of emotions, I'm thinking here of the firework effects such as airborne chrysanthemums or peonies, forms that jellyfish like grow and fluctuate, often exploding with bangs and crackle effects, some of which begin and others end their sequence of unfolding. These forms heighten excitement by activating neural pathways associated with curiosity as well as awe. These fireworks I believe tap into an evolutionary preference for eye-catching stimuli, similar to how flowers or ripe fruit grab our attention. Watching these types of fireworks doesn’t just captivate us, it feels good. The brain releases dopamine, these vivid visuals paired with loud sounds, also helping forget everyday worries, creating a temporary state of euphoria. The intersubjectivity that I mentioned earlier is in my mind confirmed by then looking around the crowd that has gathered to watch the fireworks. I see that sense of awe in many faces and know that others are feeling something similar to myself. But not everyone has the same expression, some are excited, others calm and contemplative; some are quickly distracted, whilst others remain entranced. I wonder if this is to do with the five personality traits. Often condensed into the acronym OCEAN, these are 'Openness to Experience', a measure of creativity, curiosity, and interest in new ideas; 'Conscientiousness', a measure of self-discipline and focus on goals; 'Extraversion', a measure of how sociable you are; 'Agreeableness', a measure of kindness, warmth and your cooperative nature and 'Neuroticism', the measure of your emotional stability and how easily you experience negative feelings like stress or anxiety.

I'm rambling on, but in effect as I ramble, I'm trying to think about why similar things may evoke different feelings in different people and yet at the same time a certain amount of similar or collectively understood information is also communicated. My curiosity allows me, or predisposes me, to see associations between flowers and fireworks and also at the same time because of my research into interception, I can see a connection with the shapes of firework explosions and the sorts of forms that people have used to visualise how they experience a pain.

As soon as you begin to ask someone about a pain, you begin to realise it will be a complicated answer. For instance it may feel as if it is constantly in flux, it may be flickering in and out of consciousness or pulsing, throbbing, beating, pounding, jumping, flashing, shooting, boring, drilling, stabbing, sharp, cutting, lacerating, pinching, pressing, gnawing, cramping or crushing. It may feel as if it is tugging, pulling, hot, burning, scalding, searing, tingling, itchy, smarting, stinging, dull, sore, hurting, aching, heavy, tender, taut, rasping, splitting, tiring, exhausting, sickening, or suffocating, some of these feelings coming with more emotional associations than others. Certain feelings are very closely associated with pain, someone may be fearful, frightened, terrified, or feel the pain is punishing, gruelling, cruel, vicious, blinding, annoying, troublesome, miserable, intense, unbearable, spreading, radiating, penetrating or piercing. It may also be felt as a numb pain or as if you are being squeezed or torn. Cool, cold and freezing feelings can be experienced, alongside nagging, nauseating, agonising, dreadful and torturing pain. These feelings of pain might be brief, rhythmic, continuous, momentary, periodic, steady, transient, intermittent or constant and you may feel sad about them or angry or bored or worried or just accept them. It is in the unpicking of this complexity that the individuality of interoceptual feelings are unearthed.
Basic experiences such as throbbing, burning, stabbing, shooting, aching and itchy pains have been initially in drawing led conversations visualised by dots, lines, textures, colours, etc. in both two and three dimensions. I am also aware that others have been there before me such as Tong et al 2014 and that the forms they came up with were not dissimilar to some of the shapes and colours used by myself. Their goal of "Transforming invisible physical index data that represents chronic pain as art can provide patients with an overall visual feedback of their pain experience and how it changes over time. " (Tong et al 2014, p. 1) being much more focused on achieving a set of fixed correspondences between colours and shapes and the pain experienced, whilst I'm more concerned with visualising the complex human condition of feeling pain, one that also has an emotional landscape. At the same time I'm always careful to ensure that everyone also is aware that these are images made by an artist, and even though these images are made in response to a back and forth, critique and edit process, I am in the end the originator of the colours, forms and shapes used. As to how other humans receive our collaborative and complex visual communications, I'm not sure, but it is interesting to set them out as a comparison with the work of Tong et al., especially as by putting them on black backgrounds Tong et al make their forms somewhat like fireworks exploding in a dark sky. I also like Tong et als idea that their forms are like some sort of self illuminating jellyfish moving in dark waters and as I do I begin to see a family of forms begin to cluster in my visual mind. Which may be more to do with the sorts of correspondence we find in magic rather than in any scientifically verifiable activity. 

From: Tong et al 2014

Each of the images below is an attempt to visualise pain, what I think is interesting is that although these images are built up from agreements with several other people who have these pains, there is no clear correspondence between them except they were all made by myself. So are these images in reality simply my own visualisations of pain and they are not really proper collaborations? Should my idea of developing a new pain chart have to be parked? I shall see. But at the moment my worries about subjectivity are growing and I begin to wonder if all I have done is give myself opportunities to engage in image making that stretch my capacity for visual invention, rather than my making an objective visual record of a collaborate conversation. It is very hard to remove myself from the process. 

Images of people in pain

Reference

Tong, X., Gromala, D., Shaw, C. and Clarke, P., 2014, July. Transformation between Electronic Arts and Chronic Pain: Long-term Body Activity Data Visualisation and Pain Animation. In Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2014). BCS Learning & Development.

See also:

Decor Art

Fireworks

Drawing and healing traditions

A highway code for pain

Ibrahim el Salahi pain relief drawings.

The fragmented body

The brain looks

The fragmented body is a concept that runs through many myths and continues as a way of understanding corporality today. However there has been a shift in emphasis. In our digital era, the "fragmented body" suggests that human identity is no longer seen as a single, indivisible whole, but is an assembled constellation of parts, that might include avatars, data points, as well as localised somatic memories, all loosely held together in both physical and virtual spaces. There is a tension that exists between our physical presence and our digital existence, one that I am very aware of when trying to develop images using an awareness of the screen presence of others. My interoceptual research is related to somatic memory. This type of information is not the same as a unified story or narrative; in this case trauma and lived experiences are felt by the inner body as physical fragments, such as anxiety in the chest or tension in the shoulders. The body remembers in analogous parts, not anatomical, but imagined organs or 'humours' that carry inherited and personal histories.  My personal imagined body is therefore an amalgam of fragments, reflecting an ongoing, messy negotiation between the parts of myself existing within the various servers that host data collecting systems and the invisible somatic interoceptually experienced body, that I and everyone else inhabits, all of which is though also part and parcel of what I 'see' as me. All of my memories of myself in old photographs, those glimpses in shop windows that I walk past and the early morning gaze in the mirror as I shave or brush my teeth. My feeling is that I ought to somehow be able to gather the pieces together and if I can, to visualise them as the living breathing entity that is me. 

I also have another set of visual ideas that emerge alongside these thoughts, they evolve using processes that are more intuitive than rational; I'm never sure about how they sit within the processes of objective evaluation, but they are there and are as real as any others, so whatever happens, happens. For instance the image of the brain looking that opens this post just arrived, it came out of nowhere, or at least it didn't come out of a rational process. I was looking at an old watercolour and began to see its potential as a left and right sided brain image. The brain uses both hemispheres to see, splitting your field of view: the left side of the brain processing the right visual field and the right side of the brain the left. Having two eyes leads to stereopsis, which in turn allows for stereoscopic depth perception. 

My mind travels around and makes connections, in this case the image that was emerging felt as if it was making some sort of statement about what Jonathan Crary had to say about the role of the stereoscope in the quantification and formalisation of the physiological operation of binocular vision. He argued that optical devices such as the stereoscope, were related to a new (early 19th century) arrangement of knowledge about the body and its relationship with social power. Crary argued that these pieces of apparatus were inseparably connected to the remodelling of people as observers. He wrote that if we are to understand the present world of post-photography and CGI, we need to go back to the early 19th century, to see how the idea of an observer was changing back then and that the implications of that change, were still being felt now. Crary uses 'observer' rather than 'spectator' in this context, because of the association of the word 'observer' with the observing of rules. Human vision becomes 'measurable and thus exchangeable'. (1992, p.17) My image of the brain above is looking out, undertaking a binocular observing, a visualisation of a feeling or intuition of the type of monster that lies behind the screen of measurement that was being erected at the time and which I suspect is still behind so many 'scientific' observations. Usually the brain is joined up with all the other organs, but in science fiction it often emerges out of the body, becoming an entity in its own right and as such it often asserts a powerful agency. 

It has also become one of the body parts that inhabit the fragmented body that has begun to emerge from my work attempting to visualise interoceptual experiences. Sometimes when people talk to me about headaches or other 'inside the head' feelings, they describe their own brains as separate entities. 

The brain becoming sentient

In my own mind/brain, I began to see an image of some sort of blob like living creature, an evolving brain thing. Because of the times I spent in the Gaumont cinema as a boy, I have many memories of 1950s films; 'The Blob' being like 'The Day the Earth Stood Still', a seminal influence on my image generating abilities. 

Still from 'The Blob" 1958 Dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr and Russell Doughten

Issue 70 of Haus-a-rest was entitled 'The fragmented body', which reminded me that ideas are often 'in the air', I hadn't previously seen that issue, but the fact that it was titled the same as my post, suggests that someone has a very similar idea about how we think about our bodies.

Hanzhi Zhong: Internal Censor

Of the various responses to the issue's call, one in particular intrigued me,"Internal Censor" was a series of monoprints created in 2023 by Hanzhi Zhong, she stated that her work reflected "her inner journey filled with complex emotions, portraying a chaotic state within." ... and..."the visceral experience of anxiety, drawing inspiration from somatisation, where emotional turmoil manifests physically." Zhong engages in prolonged meditation before starting a piece, revealing she states, "the clear mirror of my inner self and enabling me to embody the essence of human existence without inhibition or constraint." I am interested in her use of Buddhist thought, she also says, "I've always believed that the human body is more connected to nature than we imagine. We come from nature and eventually return to it. In my creations, the uncertainties of life, the vastness of nature, and the intricacies of the human body come together to form a tapestry of mutual fusion that I envision...I envision peeling away layers of flesh to uncover the core of existence. The skeleton represents the disappearance of outward appearance."

Hanzhi Zhong

She has like myself set fragments of the body out into the world, or at least envisioned them there, in the case above they penetrate a still life; as you look at it, it absorbs you into its form. Zhong's bringing together the 'vastness of nature' with 'the intricacies of the human body', is perhaps what I'm also searching for, or at least something like that. The body and landscape fused together  into a new form. Like myself she uses printmaking, animation and working in 3D to realise her ideas, so it will be interesting to see where she gets to. 

Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson is no longer supported by contemporary computer software as its over 20 years old. This fact reminds me of the work I did over 30 years ago using Hypercard stacks to animate ideas; I've become very aware that ideas are lost as well as fragmented as technology moves on. Jackson states, "My leg is always twitching, jumping, joggling. It wants to go places. It has had enough of waiting." I was intrigued that her leg had a voice, it was separately active. "Patchwork Girl" is a digital collage-narrative, collage being the go to cut-up technology of fragmented worlds. The monster States; "I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself." Patchwork Girl was a work that acknowledged the importance of Frankenstein in our collective imagination, a body composed of parts, is also a frightening thought. 

I'm sort of on board with the idea of the audience having to put all the parts together, but as yet I'm not sure I know where all the parts fit. 

Some laid out body parts

Details from work exhibited at Barnsley Civic

The body suit that I made when trying to work building an image using both somatic feelings and intimations gathered from trying to communicate with someone via a computer screen, wasn't right either, but there were aspects of it that seemed to touch upon what I was feeling for.

Body suit

When I was in Venice two exhibits in particular helped me to think about these issues. The human/landscape work of Chiara Camoni and the installation by Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos, entitled, 'Efforescence/The way we wake'. Camoni had built landscapes out of sections of a human figure, hollowing out the form so that it could be inhabited by other things. 

Chiara Camoni 

The figure becoming as you saw it from the back, all landscape and then as you moved around the sections, they cohered into a reclining human. Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos, had dismembered their figure much more brutally, so that it appeared broken. 

Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos

The various parts were though now becoming inhabited by other entities, as though a giant figure had died and then the landscape of its body, was now being inhabited by a nation of tiny people. 

Osiris: Fitzwilliam Museum

However it is the ancient Egyptian myth of the dismemberment of Osiris that I think about most. The god Set dismembered Osiris and scattered the parts across Egypt. His wife Isis reassembled the fragments, and in doing so establishing an idea of the resurrection of the body. In Egyptology, it also describes how Egyptians conceptualised the human body as an association of independent anatomical parts. It was this aspect that in particular was working its way into the images I was making.

In the myth, the jealous god Set organises a banquet to which he invites Osiris. During the banquet he presents a beautiful magical box, that he says he will give to anyone who fits into it perfectly. No one but Osiris will fit it, because Set had made it that way. As soon as Osiris lay down in the box, Set slams it shut and seals it. He then throws the coffin, for this is what the box actually was, into the Nile and it floats away into the sea.
Osiris's wife Isis, Set's sister, was mortified, but she was determined not to be defeated by her brother's wiles and turning herself and her sister Nephthys into hawks, they flew over the area until they were informed of a strange tree that had exhibited unworldly powers. This strange and miraculous tree was a tamarisk and when the drifting coffin had washed ashore at Byblos on the Phoenician coast; the tree had suddenly shot up from the ground and rapidly grown around the beached coffin, completely enclosing it inside its living trunk. This trunk emitted a rich, sweet, and powerful fragrance that swept out across the sea and land, signaling its magic to both the gods and the local king. Intrigued by its supernatural growth and wonderful scent, the local king cut down the tree and installed the trunk as a main pillar in his palace hall, still housing Osiris within. Isis entered the kings palace in disguise as an old woman and was soon trusted to look after the kings son. She used her magic to try and make the king's baby son immortal, a sort of test as to whether or not she had the skills to revive Osiris. During this process whereby she bathed the baby in a magical fire, her identity was revealed and she demanded access to the sacred trunk. After Isis retrieved it, the magical tree was anointed with myrrh and wrapped in linen, an event that inspired the creation of the Djed pillar; the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for stability, endurance, and resurrection. 

The Djed pillar;

However when Isis finally managed to get to the coffin and open it, she found that Osiris was dead. Isis was though a being of great magical power, therefore after she had recovered the chest and found the body of Osiris, she hid it, knowing that at some point in the future she would be able to use her powers to resuscitate it. However Set discovered that Isis had brought her husband's body home and he set out to find it, and then when he did, in a rage, he tore the corpse into 14 separate pieces that he scattered across all of Egypt, so that Osiris could never be found and brought back to life. Once again, Isis refused to give up on her husband and she traveled through the Egyptian swamps in a papyrus boat until she had found every single piece of her husband. Eventually she collected 13 pieces, but a fish had eaten his phallus, so she used her magic to make a golden replacement piece to complete his body. The magic required the help of Anubis, the god of mummification, and they reassembled and wrapped the body, creating the first mummy, as part of the ritual needed to bring back life. Using powerful spells, Isis temporarily revived Osiris, which was long enough for them to conceive their divine son, Horus. However Osiris had been permanently damaged and although he had returned to some form of life, it was a half life, a life that was only vital when it walked the realms of the dead, leading him to become the supreme king and judge of the underworld. Effectively he was now a form of living death.

The myth suggest that life continues past death. Osiris's revival offers humans hope for an afterlife. The myth also suggests the annual flooding of the Nile and accompanying planting cycles, Osiris representing crops dying and sprouting anew. However, the seasons are eternal, and fixed. They represent absolute qualities like time, life and death or divinity. Osiris now presiding as the judge of the underworld embeds and establishes a moral accountability, as being central to the fixed laws of the universe. The myth of Osiris is an idea that helps us accept our materiality and which folds that acceptance into a deeper significance, the fact we will die is balanced with the fact that we will be re-born, our seeds are our children and while we are inhabiting our physical existence, we also need to remember that we have a moral accountability to the world. 

Sobek carrying the body of Osiris: Staatliche Museum Berlin

Stories mutate and if we look at the images of Sobek above, the crocodile God carrying a deceased Osiris mummy on its back, we confront an alternative story, whereby Sobek, the son of Isis and Osiris, becomes the gatherer of the dismembered body parts of his father. After the Middle Kingdom, in some parts of Egypt, Horus became associated with the crocodile god Sobek, who in a new version of the Osiris myth, traveled through the watery Nile landscapes to search for the remains of his murdered father, in order to bring him back to life. As helpers of Osiris, Sobek and his children (crocodiles) were thus, perhaps strangely in our eyes, regarded as saviours. However Chinese dragons (loong) are also positive symbols. They represent wisdom, luck, power and ultimate goodness, being thought of as benevolent protectors as well as bringers of life-giving water. From the Late Period onward, images of crocodiles bearing mummies became common, portraying Horus in this form as the saviour of his father.

It is as this point that I circle back to the origins of art. I wrote a while ago when looking at art's etymological roots, that the morpheme derived from the Sanskrit language, that the word 'art' evolved from, was 'rt', a concept still in use in relation to the original meaning of 'rta' a word in Sanskrit that represents the ‘cosmic order of things’. 'Rta' as a concept combines both the 'cosmic order of things' as a physical order of the universe and as a moral ordering of the universe. Therefore 'Rta' is a pivot between the physical and the intellectual, between matter and spirit. It has been argued that this looking for 'rightness' is the oldest idea known to humans and it is what I believe I'm feeling, when I sense that when I'm lost in the making of things, that what I'm doing is 'right', another word that has evolved from the 'rt' morpheme. By conjoining with a material force that sits outside of myself, we shape an idea together, in doing so an external mind is made, something that proves that inanimate matter can be infused with life.

My need to go back to old myths is based on an intuition that our remodelling as observers is wrong. Crary's argument that we need to understand the present world as being one shaped by the technologies of photography, CGI and their latest home the mobile phone, might hold water, but the deeper neurological connections our brains make are wired by millions of years of experience and associated evolution. I believe that we need to accept that as a species we will always need art forms that are grounded in a need to re-connect us with deep myth and a desire to become an integral part of the world, a necessary balance to other disciplines and sociological imperatives that shape us into unconnected observers. 

As I make body fragments, I also begin to place them into situations whereby I can see the potential for them to be reconstructed as new forms. In my mind the fragmented body always has a metaphorical Isis hovering over it, always seeking to reconnect the parts and as they come together, looking to use that moment to give life to a new beginning. 

I'm also very aware that the fragmented body is something we normally associate with death. in Buddhist thought the concept of Patikulamanasikara, is generally translated as "reflections on the repulsiveness of the body". However, it is through meditation on the fragmented body that we can come to an acceptance of its mortality and thus begin to let go of our anxiety and worry about everyday things. Out of death emerges new life. 

Reference

Crary, J. (1992) Techniques of the observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century: London: MIT Press

See also:

The etymological root of art

Scale

Venice Biennale 2026 part two

Venice Biennale 2026 part four

Reflections on repulsiveness