Drawing consciousness Part two

Writing my last post on qualia and visualising consciousness reminded me that I had already looked at some of these issues before. The previous time I was thinking about drawing consciousness I finished my post with a reflection on the landscape drawings I had been making in West Wittering. In particular I was thinking about how landscape drawing could inform and build my personal visual dictionary, from which I could draw imagery when I was looking for forms and shapes that I could relate to interoceptual experiences. I have recently returned from another visit to the same coast and whilst I was there I decided to revisit the same locations I drew from last time, to see if I could find in my approach to the drawings better intimations of walking through a cosmic body, whereby the forms I encountered, suggested that  I was passing through a huge entity, in a similar same way to a blood platelet passing through a human body. 

I had in my earlier post on drawing consciousness reflected upon the idea that I was also when drawing somatic feelings, at the same time illustrating something about how consciousness itself might be visualised. My consciousness being part of what Jacob von Uexküll called the unwelten or phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature. My ability to sense my own embodiment, is something I automatically transfer into the way I see landscape as I draw, which is itself an activity unique to my particular human shaped organisational structure. My conscious awareness of self, being a forming principle based on an organisational structure, that itself shapes imagination, perception and interoception.  

I'll use some sketchbook drawings to try to explain. 

I took with me two sketchbooks that I had decided to use for landscape drawing and a third to use when making visual notes visiting cultural sites of interest, such as Chichester cathedral. The sketchbook drawings I'm using to illustrate my point about drawing consciousness are all taken from an A4 size sketchbook that uses Indian rag made watercolour paper. As usual I'm using a dip in pen to draw with, supplemented by diluted inks and in this case the occasional use of liquid graphite.  

The first location I sought out was one where on my previous visit I had drawn from a beach littered with the broken concrete remains of what were I think sea defences. This time I took with me coloured inks, making the drawings directly in red ink and then using dilutions of the ink to reinforce a visual connection to my background awareness of human anatomy, such as ribs emerging from a broken body. I had just before leaving for the coast had to deinstall my work that was on exhibition at Salt's Mill. 'The Cosmic Body' was partly made in response to the Zen Buddhist Japanese idea of Kusôzu, in particular the 5th stage of decay, which was often illustrated using an exposed rotting ribcage. The cosmic body suggested that our idea of the universe itself can only in reality be one that is based on our embodied consciousness and that although science states that it can think outside of this box, the fact that consciousness is embodied, I would argue means we can never escape the fact that all the visualisations we make, have to in one way or another reflect that phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature.

Sketchbook drawing 2026

Sketchbook drawing 2025

The Cosmic Body 2026

The 5th Stage of decay

As I drew the various sea eroded remains of these concrete structures, I imagined that they were the remaining vestiges of a huge under the earth giant, a creature that had at some time in the past inhabited this part of the world. I was thinking of Gog and Magog, who were portrayed as giants in British folklore and Arthurian legend, where they were imagined as the surviving remnants of the people of ancient Albion. A story that had its roots in the Bible, where Gog and Magog represent evil armies that would have to be defeated in a final apocalyptic battle by the armies of Christ.

As I drew these concrete remains, I noticed that there were thin vein like structures that ran through a surface I was looking at. This together with a rusty spike that protruded out of the centre of the structure, triggered another association, that of sliced ham. 

Ham on a meat slicer

I remembered the ham having to be pushed onto a spike, as part of the stabilising process before you could begin the slicing. Once this image was in my head, I carried it with me as I returned to draw yet another broken sea defence. This time the organic concrete form, below, looked as if it was part of a dismembered giant's body, from the moment I began the drawing.

Sketchbook drawing: Concrete form/body part: 2026

As I moved on to draw from another coastal area I was again thinking about Kusôzu images.

A Kusôzu image

Sketchbook drawings 2026

The way that seaweed drapes itself over old wooden posts or fallen tree branches, reminded me of the way that Altdolfer drew trees; somehow he managed to draw them so that you were reminded of Christ's Crown of Thorns and rotting flesh, peeling off a decaying body. 

Altdolfer: Spruce tree: 1550

Sketchbook drawing 2026: Seaweed over tree branches

Altdolfer was very much in my mind when I drew the image above of seaweed hanging from tree branches. 

At one point I was looking at a sea worn island of a remaining bank of soil that had fallen onto the beach after erosion had undercut the coastal walkway. I decided it now protruded from the beach like the head of some sort of dinosaur. As I drew it, I remembered images from Godzilla films, the creature's giant head rising up out of the ocean; popular culture now filtering through, as I re-immersed myself in a landscape that has become an important shaper of my visual language.

Sketchbook drawing: Beach form/dinosaur head: 2026

As I drew a tree, its roots being exposed by erosion, I was reminded of a body being operated upon, an image in my mind of exposed veins and arteries, causing me to use red ink to visually pull the tree and its roots out of the landscape and to insert it mentally into the landscape/body I was looking for. 

Sketchbook drawing: Tree roots/arteries: 2026

During the time I was in west Wittering I filled the sketchbook with coastline images, all of which were in one way or another, attempts to find a syntheses between what I was observing in the external world and what my internal world was telling me . Hopefully the ideas that they conjured up in my mind as I drew them are communicable and that as a reader you can see how when I'm drawing from perception, I'm at the same time drawing from imagination and that observational and imaginative approaches to drawing are fused. 

In my previous post on drawing consciousness I pointed out that like myself, Regis and Brigitte Dutheil agree that the mind creates the sensations we become aware of. In this post hopefully I have been able to give a flavour of how I think this works from an artist's point of view. In doing so I also believe that these drawings operate as images of consciousness and that if this is the case, Altdolfer's drawing of a tree would also have to be read as an image of his consciousness too. It is not like any spruce tree I have ever encountered, but it is like other drawings by Altdolfer I have seen. The sensibility that comes through a handmade image, being like a glimpse into another human's consciousness. 

See also:

Drawing consciousness

Qualia and visualising consciousness

Invisible worlds

Scale

More thoughts on drawing the coast at West Wittering

The geometry of consciousness

Qualia and Visualising consciousness

 

An embodied thought

If structuralists are right, our perceptions of experience depend on how we have perceived all other previous experiences. When we encounter red, in order to define it or hold it in our heads as a distinct category,  we contrast it with other colours, as well as compare it to entirely different perceptual categories. For instance, red is sort of like orange, but distant from blue, and nothing at all like pain or joy. Contemporary neuroscience has used this contrast and compare qualia situation to develop classification schemes of experience, often couched as abstract geometric shapes. “Our approach is to categorise all possible relationships between qualia,” says psychologist Nao Tsuchiya at Monash University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, who leads the Qualia Structure Project.

The Qualia Structure Project is regarded as being fundamental to an understanding of consciousness and it has at its core a mathematical approach that uses a geometric analysis enabling researchers to boil data down to shapes.  For instance, based on his experiments, Tsuchiya estimates that we experience at least seven dimensions of colour. A report on the project states that it "has turned some of the classic philosophical thought experiments into actual empirical experiments. For instance, "is my red the same as your red?" ...The project invited participants into the lab for intensive testing. Four were flagged as colour-blind on a standard screening test, four weren’t flagged but volunteered that their colour vision seemed different and three had typical colour vision. Within each group, people made the same judgements about the resemblance of colours, but between groups, these assessments diverged. By doing a geometric analysis, the researchers boiled the data down to a shape. That of the second group – the self-reported colour-blind people – had features of the shapes of the other groups. “It’s an intermediate shape,” says Tsuchiya. In the structural way of thinking, what we take to be red is defined by its position within this shape. So, people within a group were entitled to say, “My red is the same as your red.” But what was red for people in one group might effectively be green for those in another. Tsuchiya describes the intermediate, second group as a “bridge” between atypical and typical colour experience, able to grasp the colour experiences of both." (Togashi, 2026)

Recently the project has been studying emotion. They have been showing participants pairs of videos that are supposed to elicit emotional responses. The early results are that both highly sensitive people and far less emotionally literate people experience emotion interoceptually in similar ways, but some people are more able to communicate this experience than others. I thought this chimed with my own work. Most people seem to have some awareness of their interoceptual experiences but they differ in their ability to articulate this. My work is mainly to help people become aware of these experiences, whilst this scientific project seeks to measure them; a typical art/science divide. 

From a series of images trying to visualise heartache

Tsuchiya says, “Experience is all about relationships,” He has used category theory to develop a descriptive language for these relationships, hoping that science will then be able to explain experience. If he is successful, he would like to build something similar to the periodic table to show how qualia work. However Loorits, in the paper 'Explanatory Relevance of Ineffable Qualia', states that the unanalysability of qualia is an important feature of human psychology. He brings in our experience of art to support this, stating that we often perceive experiences of art as unanalysable from the first-person perspective, until at a later stage we begin to adopt critical distance. I think this varies from person to person. I know some people that launch into analysis from the moment they experience art. I find that very difficult and am usually too overwhelmed by the experience to be able to break it down and analyse it, its only later, perhaps three or four days later, that I begin to think about what it might mean. 

This debate goes on whilst at the same time I continue with my own visual research. I still talk to people and ask them what feelings might look like and I still draw shapes and colours and textures that are attempts to connect a feeling with a visual form and run workshops to see how people can develop their own visual language to represent internal feelings. If it is true that experiences are all relative to one another, then even one viewed by an individual differently will effect how all the others are seen by that individual. Professor Dr. Holger Lyre states that 'people with synaesthesia, taste words or smell colours and therefore perceive these connections directly, but all of us, he states make them, therefore he proposes that, “To a certain extent, we are all synaesthetes.' (In Musser, 2026) This statement by Professor Lyre reinforces my decision to use the kiki / bouba sound shape connection example as a starting point for visualising interoception workshops. I also think that it is fascinating to watch what type of geometric analysis the Qualia Structure Project will come up with, but my feeling is that it will still not be able to solve the conundrum of consciousness. I am though as an artist happy to use my conscious awareness to develop visual responses to unseen events. There is enough mystery in the processes involved in communicating the un-communicable to keep me interested for some time yet and hopefully at some point my work will be used as a sort of instinctual counterbalance to the work being conducted by the Qualia Structure Project.   

A slide from one of my presentations on interoceptual awareness

Anger mask

Many years ago when I was at art college we had to look at the work of J. L. Austin, his book 'How to do things with words', was seen as seminal by my then tutor Keith Arnatt. We looked at illocutionary acts and in particular I remember being very interested in Austin's thoughts on the nature of pretence. Austin broke communication down into three parts, Locutionary Acts: The literal, physical act of communicating something, producing the sounds and constructing the words or making in our case, the art; the welding, drawing, painting processes. Illocutionary Acts: The performance of a communicative function in saying those words (e.g., using the words within the context of a warning or a promise), or presenting the artwork (framed perhaps by the gallery blurb as a warning, as an aesthetic experience or as an investment) and finally the Perlocutionary Act: The actual effect or consequence the utterance or exhibition has on the audience (e.g., persuading, comforting, alarming, or annoying them). Consciousness in Austin's terms was more to do with how we used language, but what if we were pretending? Pretending in relation to art seemed to myself to be to do with mimesis and mimesis was one of the art raft's central planks. Austin made a distinction between pretending to do and pretending to be. Pretending to be something, such as an angry person requires carrying out a string of related behaviours associated with that identity and eventually the pretence behaviour will become assimilated. I. e. you will eventually become what you pretend to be. This was the point of the anger mask. In order to think about how it feels to be angry, sometimes we need to assimilate the related behaviours associated with anger. As we do this, we can be more aware of what we are feeling. But what if you are pretending to see a colour?  “Colour blindness” was not scientifically recognised until John Dalton’s seminal report in the late 18th century. (Taniguchi, et al, 2025) This delay implies that atypical colour vision may have long gone unnoticed because people communicated without difficulty using a shared colour vocabulary, grounded in largely overlapping phenomenology. An alternative possibility is that a shared linguistic system itself shapes colour experience in a way that renders their qualia similar. The act of using language to cover up the fact that you were pretending to see, being gradually assimilated, so that in effect people can see, even though they cant see what others do see. This belief that you can see what you cant see, was something I came across several times during my career teaching foundation students. I encountered several students who were colour blind but they had never realised it and had had no problems communicating colour experiences before. It was only when we were exploring colour mixing that this became evident. Once it was evident and we gave them a colour blindness test, most of these students then admitted that they had felt something was wrong, but had purposefully behaved as if their perception was the same as other people.  

Perhaps all masks are like that, in wearing them we reshape our consciousness. If so an awareness of consciousness is perhaps another form of pretence behaviour, something that we hide behind, because without it we might lose our sense of self, which may itself be yet another mask. 

References

Austin, J. L. (1975) How to do things with words Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

Musser, G (2026) The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2519288-the-simple-questions-cracking-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

Loorits, K. Explanatory Relevance of Ineffable Qualia. Acta Anal (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-026-00682-6

In press: Robust individual alignment of color qualia structures: toward a structure-based taxonomy of divergent color experiences. Yu Togashi, Yuko Yotsumoto, Chihiro Hiramatsu, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Masafumi Oizumi
bioRxiv 2026.02.13.705699; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.13.705699

1. Taniguchi, T., Oizumi, M., Saji, N., Horii, T. & Tsuchiya, N. (2025) Constructive approach to bidirectional influence between qualia structure and language emergence. Philos. Mind Sci. 6 

See also:

Drawing consciousness

Drawing consciousness part two

Qualia

Surface and inner body perception in the age of CGI

Drawing textures

Angles, vision and sound

Interoceptual portraits

Mimesis

Projections of a single totality

Max Beckmann

"On My Painting" ("Über meine Malerei") was a lecture delivered by Max Beckmann in July 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London. It was written while in exile, shortly after the Nazis had labeled his work "degenerate". I read it many years ago and occasionally parts of it come back to me as I struggle to clarify my own approach to art making. In particular it was his search for the invisible through the visible that intrigued me. He sought to capture the deep hidden mysterious reality behind perception. As he did so he felt he might eventually "find the Self", as well as some sort of sense of the divine. In order to do this he felt that an artist had to maintain a commitment to human sympathy, thus putting empathy with others at the centre of his practice.

Max Beckmann: Blind man's bluff

I find this time period not dissimilar to the one Beckmann was experiencing and feel that fascism is on the rise again, not just in Europe but across the world. Fascism relies on oppositions, it sets people against each other and destroys the delicate connections that we have with one another, replacing them with fear, alienation and collective unthinking action. Beckmann wanted to visualise what he called "the profound mystery of all—the human I am". Therefore he began with an investigation of himself. In the context of his fleeing from Nazi Germany, you can see that he understands that art can have a role in maintaining human sympathy and understanding during times of intense turmoil; in order to do this he visualises the world as a vast stage where the artist constructs metaphorical images of both his own life and the trauma of history. He had set himself a high bar, one I would like to aspire to, but don't have the resources to accomplish to the same level. However my memory of Beckmann's writing has inspired me to put down my own thoughts as to why I think my personal pursuit of art is useful.

I wrote recently that whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are projections of a single totality. This is something central to my practice as an artist, so bare with me as I try to unpick this somewhat.

The inside and the outside, landscape and the body, fantasy and reality, objective drawing and imaginative play, all are at one time or another seen as opposites and yet when looked at from another perspective they can all be seen as being part of the same venture, that of visualising the experience of being conscious.

From drawing a life: 2026

Visualising the experience of being conscious is a complex artistic and philosophical challenge because consciousness is an entirely subjective experience. However whether or not it is physically experienced or not depends on whether or not you argue for its understanding as embodied. I believe that as I am a very different physical entity to a dog, my consciousness will be shaped into a more human like form, which is itself physical. It is always a "first-person" experience, composed of "qualia", (a term for the information that comes in to the brain), whether this is from outside the body via the five senses or from inside via interoceptual feelings. As an artist I have to use various metaphors and abstract concepts to visualise this. Subjective experiences of consciousness are the ones that we think of as "what it's like to be". This inner awareness is what I am trying to communicate to others that have only a limited awareness of what I might be thinking. The aim is to grow that joint awareness. In the image, 'Drawing a life' above, I attempted to visualise another life, one that I was aware of through various conversations and from glimpses of that life given to me via my computer screen, it is though also a projection of a single totality, my feeling tone having filtered the information coming through and although the image is of another individual's narrative, it is, like all the other images I make, a product of my own consciousness. Perhaps the best realisation of this would be my sketchbooks, where observational drawings sit alongside imaginative investigations of ideas and where iterative thinking is used to find out what it is I'm thinking about as an image. These sketchbooks I tend to think of as batteries, storage devices that are also energy converters.

As an artist I try to externalise and make physical those hidden feelings and perceptions that I have. In doing so I aim to close down the difference between my experience of being conscious and another person's experience of being conscious. But as feelings, thoughts and sensations are private, they are impossible to describe objectively. However, I am aware that damage to the brain directly effects consciousness, which tells me it must in some way be dependent on physical structures. I'm also aware of evolutionary theory, which posits that things evolve because they are useful. Therefore consciousness will probably have evolved as an adaptive function for complex information processing and interaction with the environment. If so, by engaging with it, hopefully I help myself and others become more aware of it and how we use it to become more aware of the consciousness of others.

As consciousness is a phenomenon where subjective experience meets physical reality, engaging in art making in order to investigate it does therefore feel as if it is a good move. Every art object made is in effect the externalisation of a thought. But not just that, it is a physical embodiment of a dance that occurs between the material properties of the media of making and the consciousness that sits within the shape and form of a human being. I can't step outside of my body, but I can watch others who have similar bodies to myself do things. As they move they also react to other things, perhaps grimacing as they lift a heavy weight or smiling as they are touched by another human, as I watch I can begin to see a possible connection between my own responses to situations and the responses of others. I can begin a process of guessing or having intimations of the awareness of the minds of others. If I can guess what someone else might feel by observing their actions and reactions, then I might be able to make something that stands as a substitute for the process. Inner feelings and outer perceptions are constantly in play as I experience the world and both come into play as I make a piece of art. This is why, (and I shall now repeat what I have just written above), when I'm visualising things that attempt to crystallise experiences, the inside and the outside, landscape and the body, fantasy and reality, objective drawing and imaginative play, can all be seen as being part of the same venture, that of visualising the experience of being conscious, which is what I suspect all artists are in fact trying to do. In my case my images are thought of as projections of a single totality, a philosophical stance as much as a political position. 

Recent work has involved a process whereby an initial installation idea was visualised by myself using Photoshop and then developed in conversation with a curator, who decided on what furniture to buy from second hand furniture shops in Graz, based on my initial idea. 

The first visualisation for the installation reflecting on loneliness 

Final installation: Forum Stadtpark, Graz: "Islands of Loners"

Details: Images taken during the construction of the installation

Some of the 'votive' lino cut prints used as part of the installation

An early tryout for an installation of the 'choir'

The installation included ten of my lino prints, a blanket and pillow cases designed by myself and printed commercially, as well as forty ceramic figures making up a 'choir' of singers and several  'votives' that I had shipped to Austria for the purpose. This complex could have become very fragmented, however I hope that it cohered due to the fact that the installation was both a product of many years of my visualising the experience of being conscious and the fact that I'm still prepared to listen to the advice of others. It is a projection that has emerged out of the totality of my life's experience and as such I regard it both as personal as the prints displayed within it and as collaborative as the many images that have emerged out of conversations I have held with others. Art is a collective experience beset and troubled by the paradox of individualism; therefore I must express my gratitude to the team of Forum Stadtpark curators, who managed to tactfully help shape the final outcome.

So does a work of art still have a role in maintaining human sympathy and understanding during these times? Beckmann visualised the world as a vast stage whereby the artist could construct metaphorical images of both his own life and the trauma of history, however I have not had to witness the 'trauma of history' in the direct manner he had to; I see it via newsfeeds and on screens. My work evolves out of conversations, it acts as small moments of solace or as reminders of the shifts in our inner feeling tone, as we experience life's changes. Unlike Beckmann, who had a powerful vision of what he wanted to achieve, I struggle to clarify my own approach to art making, but out of that confusion, perhaps a different sort of myth arises, less heroic but more achievable and of the quotidian, rather than the cosmic.

See also:

Qualia

Penone draws a tree

The geometry of consciousness

A conference day

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

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