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

Drawing the processes of life

Gemma Anderson-Tempini: Garden of Forking Paths; Mitosis Score no.2, 2019. Pencil, watercolour and colour pencil on paper, 

When I attended the drawing conference "Drawing Across Along Between University Borders" in Porto in 2024, there was a presentation by Gemma Anderson-Tempini, whereby she outlined her work on what she called 'process biology'. I was fascinated to see how she had been integrated into biological laboratories, scientists obviously really appreciating what she was bringing to their understanding of the complex forms of life's processes. I was very envious of her contacts and thought the work she was doing was exemplary, so on getting home immediately bought a copy of the book she worked on, 'Drawing the processes of life'. The book explores how an artist might visually represent the dynamic processes of molecular level life, using drawing as a way of inquiring into living processes at the cellular scale. Drawing is shown to be a useful pathway to knowledge, rather than it being about the production of static images, something that I was aware I'm hoping to achieve myself, but also aware that I am still very concerned with finding that 'image' that sums an idea up. Her lecture was very useful and it gave me much food for thought. 

I am also interested in what she has to say because she had a complex installation constructed in Leeds in 2023, 'And She Built a Crooked House' whereby she had filled the rooms and garden at Burton Grange, a Victorian house in Far Headingley, Leeds, with elements of a journey through the fourth dimension; an artwork that was part-factual, part-historical and part-autobiographical. In addition to physics, concepts and ideas associated with the higher spatial dimensions were touched upon, such as maths, art, literature, cinema and the spiritual and I thought at the time that she had made a good fist of trying to show how these things could be ambitiously interconnected.

I wonder if I could make a similar or even more poetic set of connections and observations in relation to my own work. For instance is it possible to open out both scientific and sociological associations that begin with drawing the processes of life? Perhaps starting with the hand drawn diagram below of the relationship between RNA and DNA, that can be used to illustrate the fact that DNA stores genetic instructions, while RNA acts as a messenger and worker that translates those instructions into proteins. I like to think of the RNA as an open spiral, ready to connect, whilst the DNA is a closed spiral in love with itself. Reproduction and love being in our human minds often inseparable but also often subject to emotional stress. Our cells get RNA from DNA through a transcription process, which uses the DNA of a gene as a template to build a complementary RNA molecule. This happens inside the cell nucleus. This process is initiated when an enzyme called RNA polymerase binds to a specific starting sequence (the promoter) on the DNA, causing the double helix to unwind and separate. Once this happens a process of elongation begins, the enzyme reads the DNA template strand and builds a single-stranded RNA molecule by matching complementary RNA bases. However this is not a direct copy. For instance, thymine (symbol T or Thy), one of the four nucleotide bases that make up our DNA, alongside adenine, guanine, and cytosine (A, C, and G), is replaced by uracil (U) when RNA is constructed. Hence the three letter "start codon" that initiates the process is AUG. Like all other forms of transcription, during the process of converting data from one format to another, something is nearly always lost and yet at the same time, something is gained, a new read is possible, such as when a written transcription is made from a verbal model, by typing the information out it becomes more formal, it may then have more gravitas or appear to be more factual, it also becomes less personal, the unique sound of an individual's voice being lost and replaced by the chosen font that the printed text is now set within. 

Drawing of the relationship between RNA and DNA

I have looked before at the importance of folding as an underlying principle embedded into the idea of life and reproduction. Folding gives us a way to think about how reproduction is facilitated; for instance the first functions of chromosome folding are perhaps to mediate genome replication, compaction and segregation. RNA molecules play a central role in virtually all cellular processes. However in order to play out their roles, the various RNA molecules have to fold into specific three-dimensional structures. Therefore each and every RNA molecule has to at some point undergo the transition from an unfolded, disordered state to a functional conformity. A broader understanding of this transition has also led to the RNA world hypothesis. This proposes that early life forms relied almost entirely on RNA to store genetic information and catalyse chemical reactions, its ability to both self-replicate and operate as an enzyme being vital to the building of mechanisms that would eventually lead to the origin of life, facilitating both metabolism and reproduction. A RNA molecule is linear, but when folded into three dimensions ribozymes can be formed and they have similar abilities to enzymes which in turn allow for metabolism, the chemical reactions that convert food into energy. Most present day enzymes are now proteins; ribosomal RNA (rRNA) catalyses the formation of peptide bonds, stitching amino acids together to build proteinsribozymes. A ribosomal subunit is one of the two distinct, structural components that make up a complete ribosome. Ribosomes are essential for translating genetic information into proteins and are made up of two subunits: a small subunit and a large subunit. The small subunit binds to messenger (mRNA), which contains the genetic code for the protein. The large subunit adds amino acids to the growing protein chain. They are found in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and are responsible for protein synthesis, which converts genetic information into the proteins which are essential for life, as they are necessary for all cellular functions.Together, these protein-and-RNA complexes act as the cell's molecular machinery, translating genetic information from messenger RNA (mRNA) into functional proteins.

I was pleased to find this illustration of the two subunits, we are built from blobs

Inside myself I know I house all sorts of bacteria, my intestines have a long standing relationship with E coli, which comes in a variety of forms many of which are useful to myself but some are harmful. Like myself though E coli will have a deep 'code' or 'codon' that determines the form that we will finally become, and we share a sequence of three RNA nucleotides (Adenine-Uracil-Guanine) that serve as the universal "start codon". The codon signals the cellular machinery to begin building a protein and dictates the insertion of the amino acid methionine. Methionine acts as the "start codon" (AUG) that initiates the translation of every protein synthesised in the body. The combined small and large subunit of E coli is in the scientific world named the 50S ribosomal subunit and it has been visualised as in the imasge below.

The 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli 

I like this visualisation as it gives me a feeling that I think I know what sort of thing this is, even though I don't really. It intuitively feels like something I could grasp and if so, I can make something like it out of clay. It consists of three compartments, which are technically described as: the A (aminoacyl) site which binds incoming charged aminoacyl tRNAs. The P (peptidyl) site which binds charged tRNAs carrying amino acids that have formed peptide bonds with the growing polypeptide chain but have not yet dissociated from their corresponding tRNA. The E (exit) site that releases dissociated tRNAs so that they can be recharged with free amino acids. It is acting I think to put in place the first codon after the AUG. 

When I'm talking to people about what they feel their insides are up to, they may describe certain 'fictional' organs, such as a spleen, a something heard of but not very often seen, unless of course you are a medical professional. The drawn image of the 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli has now begun to inhabit my visual archive and as such it will I'm sure emerge at some point as an image related to how I visualise an interoceptual experience. An image that is initially made to help describe one of the fundamental processes of life, becoming part of an image bank dedicated to visualising how we internally feel. Both the more scientific illustration and my feeling led forms, having a relationship to an idea that organic forms begin as blobs.

The issue for myself as an artist is that the processes of life are as much emotional as scientific. Yes I know that science is opening out amazing possibilities for our future, but I also know that our crazy emotional embodied mess of stuff, is what initiated the riots that happened in Southampton recently. I'm sure a scientist somewhere is at this very moment trying to isolate the various chemicals that were released as rioters achieved states of vitriolic anger, but my present feeling tone is one of anxiety and worry that a tragic death more to do with I suspect police incompetence, is seen by many as a sign of unfair treatment and the dire straits that some people find themselves in, can become situations that feel as if they can be transformed by smashing things up. Rioting can feel as if you are operating in response to righteous anger and some people are very good as triggering this. My body has been constructed using DNA sequencing but my conscious awareness of that is very much on the back burner as I watch the riots unfold, as I go back to drawing the processes of life, I try to acknowledge that both these situations are part of my life story. 

The riot in Southampton: Protestors make Nazi gestures

I'm reminded that science is often brought to a sudden stop by fascism. Emil Starkenstein Czech-Jewish pharmacologist, one of the founders of clinical pharmacology, was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. He would have been very aware of the role chemicals take in the construction of our mind/body complex, but nothing could have saved him from the mindset that took over the people who inhabited that part of the world at that particular time. I have to have faith that we will never return to those dark days, but to ensure that, we will I'm afraid have to have the courage to stand up to bullies and those that encourage them to think that aggressive action is the only catalyst for change. 

I would of course like to think that art can be a catalyst for change. Because it doesn't offer either / or answers and gives us a series of open ended responses as to how we can feel about the world, hopefully it helps celebrate difference and offers opportunities for reflection and speculation that lead to the opening out of imaginative new worlds. 

Sketchbook drawing

I often walk and draw. I look for things that both remind me of the thoughts I have been having and which I think might also become metaphors for them. In the case of the drawing above made in West Wittering last year, I was thinking about the sea as a constant devourer of the land and of how our bodies can be thought of as landscapes. Protruding spiral cut metal rods, emerge from a beach, their concrete base covered by seaweed; this rib-like structure, reminding me of work I had made that was itself a reflection on Japanese  Kusôzu images, those graphic depictions of corpses in the process of decay; images that were used by Buddhists to meditate upon the fragility of life and the reality of death. The processes of life are inseparable from those of death, there being a constant oscillation between the two states. In the acceptance of this we remove our constant internal suffering by coming to an understanding of the true nature of reality. Making a drawing of what you are seeing slows you down, it engages you in a dialogue with the materials of recording and the ability of your own body to shape those materials into a vision of what is seen. In doing this, contemplation begins and your breathing changes, becoming deeper and more in tune with the landscape you are within. I would argue that drawing is itself also therefore a process of life and that it is in many ways a form of meditation. My own image bank has recently been dedicated to visualising how we internally feel and these images are imaginatively conceived in the drawings I make of my external world. The process of drawing is internalising my perceptions of the external world. As these perceptions are recorded, they become as internalised things, not unlike those other internal objects that I think of as my body's organs or the scientific illustrations such as the 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli that I have also recently been looking at. This personal narrative becomes a story out of which emerges the things I make as art, products of my own life's processes.

See also:

Why interoception?

Drawing and politics 1

Drawing and politics 2

Drawing and politics 3

Drawing and politics 4

What is embodiment?

The fold

Drawing on conversations

A visual conversation about a pain that felt like an insect or scorpion sting

The images above are from a range of drawings done in response to a conversation with someone about a pain they had, which at one point they described as being similar to being stung by an insect or scorpion. Some of the drawings were done during the time of the conversation, reminders of what had been said. Others were drawn up after the conversation was over and then taken back into a further conversation, whereby the first conversation was reflected upon and the more 'worked up' drawings were shown to the other conversationalist.  This was part of an iterative process, designed to eventually get to a point whereby the other person was able to say, "Yes it felt like that," or "I imagined the situation to look like that". This process is hopefully helping someone see what was initially invisible but felt, it was experienced but the experiencer had as yet no visual shape for it. 

A large part of my practice is devoted to listening to people in conversation. Over the years these conversations have varied, from stories about the terrible journeys people might have made to get to Leeds from often war torn areas of the world, via the drama of world politics, to more recent ones about ageing bodies or the trauma of injury. Sometimes we forget that the glue that ties us all together is made out of the grain of conversations.
Conversations are complex things and although informal, they instigate the interactive exchange of thoughts, ideas and feelings between people. Conversation is vital to the way our species socialises, comes to an agreed understanding and maintains connections between individuals and groups.

Conversations are though not always what we think they are; only part of the content of a conversational exchange derives from the actual words said. The tone of voice can be extremely influential, as can facial expressions, women may understand things differently from men, people of one generation may have a world view totally different to another, someone from another culture may have preconceptions that you don't and many other psychological and physiological factors may interfere with clear communication. Even so, without someone being prepared to listen as carefully as possible and someone else being prepared to try hard to explain themselves or their understanding of a situation, we would never be able to come to any form of coauthored agreement on the nature of our existence.

These blog posts are a type of conversation, but they are very one sided. My views are put down, but nobody is probing them, no questions are asked as to what I mean, (well not immediately, I do get questions by e mail or verbally when I meet people) and whatever I think at the time is frozen in place. If you compare this to a real time conversation you will see a huge difference. When we’re in one to one conversation, our brains literally sync up. This is something called "neural coupling" or "neural entrainment". It is when the electrical impulses in two brains become synchronised. When you talk and another person listens. you gradually find yourselves “on the same wavelength”. This is why a conversation can be transformative. But you have to leave yourself open to what the other person is saying. For instance it can be too easy to dismiss a conflicting belief or to agree with something that fits your opinion. It is in the back and forth of conversation that meaning is made.

There is something called the 'Johari Window' that was proposed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, as a way to visualise conversational and other relationships.

The Johari Window

The Johari Window is a rectangle that has within it four areas representing different aspects of self knowledge or self awareness. The Open Area is where we find the common or shared knowledge about our lives and our feelings about the world. The Blind Spot is where others know things about you and the world you inhabit, but which you don’t yet know about. The Hidden Area, is what is hidden within yourself in terms of knowledge and perspectives known only to you. Your intensions for instance, might be very different to your actions, we all have things we would like to keep private. The Unknown Area, which is what is unknown to both you and others, is the area represented in black in the diagram and in reality it would have to be of a cosmic scale, as we can only know what we experience and we can only experience that tiny, fleeting moment given to us by a conscious life, everything else that has ever existed is unknown to us. Even so, it is within that moment that conversations take place and as they do the open area can grow and become fertile ground for the development of new thought. 

But in conversations with people that you have only just met you need to build some sort of trust, especially if they are going to open up to you in any meaningful way. Therefore you need to listen closely to them, then when they finish talking, it is useful to summarise their side of the conversation. You can then ask questions about what they said, all of which makes it clear to the other person that you are listening carefully to them.

The conversations that form part of my art/research practice are usually drawing led. This means that my summaries of what is being said are quickly drawn sketches. These sketches form a kernel around which a particular understanding will grow, one that I might in some ways know more about than the other person, simply because drawing is my language of choice. However we both engage with the process of critiquing what is being drawn. The part of the conversation that is centred on, "it's more like this drawing than that one", or "this line should be darker or thinner", being where an exchange takes place that gradually builds an image in my head and in the head of the person telling me a story about themselves. Hopefully this image is new to both of us, it is something discovered through the conversational process. For myself, this helps me in terms of my own validation of a working practice, as it reinforces my belief in the importance of interactive exchanges with others in order to develop ideas. It places socialisation at the centre of my practice and most importantly I have to develop an agreed understanding of a visual language, something which I feel is often lacking when I see artwork placed within a context where non-art trained people have to encounter it. 

Even so when I show the work done outside of the conversation from which it emerged, other people who were not party to the conversation, often find it a challenge to understand what is being communicated. I have had to accept that there is no such thing as a universal language and that instead I now believe that languages are constantly evolved by some sort of social interaction, always being re-negotiated and changed in response to new experiences. 

In order to get a better theoretical grasp of what it is to develop ideas and knowledge through conversations, I have looked at the work of Gordon Pask. His  major contribution to communication research was the development of Conversation Theory.  This grew out of his work with cybernetics and his analysis of the dynamic process whereby both people and machines learn about each other. He first came to my notice because of the 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity which included his robotic courtship model, whereby biomorphic shapes moved in relation to each other, responding to a program that the audience could interact with.  

Gordon Pask: Display for Cybernetic Serendipity 

Pask believed that the more we learn about how we learn from interactions with others, the more tolerant we would become and society would be a much better thing. If only listening and sharing had become the norm, instead the role models we now have are much more about bullying and getting your own way and his early computer learning models have fostered an AI that seems to be linked to the worst of human nature, rather than Pask's idea that learning should always be beneficial and generative.  Even so it might be useful to go through Pask's major ideas and see how useful they might me, especially when it comes to evaluating a practice like my own, that relies on conversation as a methodology. 

 

 

Gordon Pask's model of conversation in the form of a diagram

The five major elements of conversation in the diagram above are:

• Context: when and where it happens: the conversational content must suit the situation and be something agreed or at least accessed by both participants. 
• Language: people's interests are related to their sub-group pre-occupations, such as particular words that only those involved in that sub-group would know. Language is not just about understanding English or Chinese, it’s also about tone and intention and having shared values, as well as a recognition that in my case drawing is a language too; all of which need to be dealt with in a conversation if we are to continue to…
• Exchange: the back-and-forth of messages that we usually think of as conversation
• Agreement: what we understand from each other and believe together, even if we agree to disagree about everything, at least we have understood that we have different points of view.
• Transaction or action: what happens afterward as a direct result of the conversation.

In an earlier post on communication theory I pointed out that the central weakness of a transmission theory of communication is that it is not concerned with the production of meaning itself, which is a socially mediated process. This is why there are several constitutive theories, because meaning production is complicated. In particular how can we say something novel or different to one another? We need the capacity for new messages to be generated and the resultant understanding confirmed or denied. The best method I know that can deal with this is 'conversation'. In conversation we can learn new concepts, share and evolve knowledge, and confirm agreement. Diagrams can both be used to describe how this works and to reinforce the idea that drawing is a language.

Conversation for Agreement
As a result of conversation, two people believe that they agree.

Gordon Pask would suggest that conversation as a process is a bit like this:
Step one: Open a channel. When one person sends an initial message, the possibility for conversation opens. For conversation to follow, the message must establish common ground; it must be comprehensible to the other participant.

Step two: Commit to engage. The other participant must pay attention to the message and then commit to engaging with the the person that initiated the conversation. Such a commitment may amount to nothing more than continuing to pay attention. For conversation to persist, the commitment must be symmetrical and move back and forth and there must be the possibility for either side to break off from the conversation for any reason, at any time.

Step three: Construct meaning. Conversation enables the conversationists to construct meaning, including meaning that is new to one or other of the participants. This 'meaning' will though come out of a shared context, so will be to some extent socially determined. I.e. The person that opens the conversation uses it to convey what the topic of discussion is; the technical term is 'descriptive dynamics', they will often try to explain how the topic might be used to understand a new concept, (prescriptive dynamics or "what should we do next?"). The other conversationalist “takes all this in” and “puts it all together” in an attempt to reproduce the other person's meaning. In most conversations it is presumed that there is some sort of sharing, a common language is often developed, but some work is often needed for this to happen. Think of two people carrying a heavy weight, as one person shifts their grip the other person responds, until between them they have a better grip on the situation. The moving of the weight is in effect what the two of them share and without this sharing the weight would be dropped. This is the inherent coherence at the centre of the conversation concept, one that allows myself to introduce drawing as part of a conversation; it helps me 'shift my grip' and as I do so, the other person has to 'shift their grip' in order not to drop the weight. As our human nervous system has evolved especially to make sense of the messages that arrive, “meaning making”, the taking in of what both yourself and the other person are saying and putting it all together, is the most natural thing to happen.

Step four: Converge on agreement. One participant may wish to confirm their understanding of the other's ideas. To do so, they might create a different formulation of the topic(s) under discussion, to see if it holds water when reformulated. The other person then attempts to make sense of this new formulation and compares it with their original. This is an iterative process that often leads to further exchanges. When both judge that the concepts match sufficiently, they have reached “an agreement over an understanding.” It is at this point that hopefully in my work where I hold drawing conversations with people, that we stop for a while and I take the drawings done away and try to refine them, before bringing them back and resuming the conversation.

Step five: Evolve or stay. After the interaction of conversation, either one or both people may hold new beliefs, make decisions they would not have made before or develop new ways of thinking about relationships, with other things, people or themselves. On the other hand it is always possible that both people's mindsets will remain as they were.

Step six: Act or Transact. Sometimes one or both of the participants agree to perform an action as a result of the conversation that has taken place. For example, in my case I may agree to develop a series of images in response to the conversation and bring the results back in a week's time. The other person may agree to think about their situation in a new way as a result of our conversation, especially as we would have spent quite some time reflecting on their interoceptual experiences and trying to devise a language to describe them.

Conversation to Learn
Conversation is a means to convey concepts and confirm agreement.
A conversation changes one of the participants. That participant has “learned” something

In my work in the hospital it is critical to consider what can’t be talked about. Conversations may be limited in fundamental ways. For instance the conversational infrastructure may prevent certain things being talked about. If asked, “How well does the infrastructure support the conversational connection?”, I would have to respond with a few reservations. For instance a hospital ward is not private and there are constant intrusions by others wanting access to the patient. Therefore patients find it hard to be totally open about their experiences. I am also a new person in their lives so it is natural for patients to have certain reservations about opening out to myself, especially in relation to private matters.
The situation is potentially loaded with emotional dilemmas. I leave it to the clinical consultant to make the initial contact with a patient, trusting that they will only select people for the experience, that the consultant feels are emotionally robust enough to take part in conversations designed to get them to face their current situation, that of being in a spinal injury ward. Even so, I have to reflect carefully on how far to go in relation to descriptions of people's injuries, so that I don't trigger emotionally negative responses. Just as importantly the conversational participants will have different capacities for responding to the type of conversations I initiate. Each individual will contribute what they know in their own style of interaction and it can take me a while to recognise this. Even after all these considerations some drawing led conversations may go nowhere, whilst other conversations create their own energy and are generative, leading to new and unexpected knowledge but at the beginning of these conversations I never know which ones will be productive.

Conversation to Collaborate: Agreeing on goals and coordinating actions to achieve them

If the conversation is to work, it has to offer something for both participants. As a conversation develops the ongoing exchange has to identify the potential benefits in continuing the engagement. There ought to be some learning or interest stimulated, or at least some sort of delight in the situation, such as the positive experience of someone actually being prepared to listen to your story.

In this very one sided conversation I suppose it's now time to see if I can convince the reader that there is more to it than a simple break down and exploration of the stages that make up conversations and how they help in the production of meaning.

Tim Ingold has pointed to the fact that all we are is an intermingling. We are part of an ever forming universe where everything is enfolded into everything else. He argues that we live in a ‘con-crescent’ world. (Concrescent: in biology, a growing together of initially separate parts or organs). In response to this situation he further argues that when seeking the truth a conversation will be everything, not just between people but between all the possible things that you might be able to connect with. The process he states is fundamentally democratic and is concerned with conjoint actions; bodies in correspondence being engaged in democratic conversations forming communities of open-endedness. He finally argues that ‘Commoning’ or the joining with others will be the key drivers behind sustainability. The holding of conversations being not just about how we develop empathy for other people and learn from them, we need to develop conversations with plants, other animals, minerals, electrons, quarks and energy forces, if we are to overcome the hubris of thinking that we have any form of separation from or dominance over nature. In her book, 'Finding the Mother Tree', Suzanne Simard establishes that trees not only 'talk' to but co-operate with mycorrhizal fungi and that they are central to an interconnected eco system that at one time always included human beings. She reminds us that the indigenous humans understood this and that the Secwepemc, the first nation people who inhabit the interior of British Columbia in Canada, have a word Kw̓seltktnéws (pronounced kw-selt-kt-news), a fundamental principle that translates to "we are all related", a worldview that acknowledges that all people, animals, plants, water and soil are interconnected, requiring stewardship, respect, and reciprocity. 

I am I know repeating myself when I write about these ideas but perhaps that's a good thing, the art of rhetoric suggesting that repetition is very useful if you want to convince your audience that you strongly believe in the message you are trying to deliver. 

References:

Pask, G. (1976) Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology London: Elsevier Science Ltd

Simard, S. (2021) Finding the mother tree: Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest London: Penguin

See also:

Drawing conversations
Drawing and communication theory
Is drawing a language?
Is drawing a language? Part 2
Is drawing a language? Part 3
Is drawing a language? Part 4
Tim Ingold democratic conversations

Shamanism and art

Maggi Hambling and Touch

Back in September 2016 Lund Humphries published the first book to focus on the drawings and prints of Maggi Hambling and it was called 'Touch'. The book was designed to accompany an exhibition of Hambling's works on paper at the British Museum and had a text written by Jennifer Ramkalawon. 

Dancing bear

Elephant without tusk

Laughing

The book's text opened with three quotes by Rodin, Derrida and John Berger, all of which are thoughtful reflections on the relationship between touch and sight.

What is this drawing? Not once in describing the shape of that mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it … my objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see. 

AUGUSTE RODIN

A draftsman cannot but be attentive to the finger and the eye, especially to anything that touches upon the eye, to anything that lays a finger on it in order to let it finally see or let it be seen [donner à voir]. 

JACQUES DERRIDA

Her fingers touching the paper with a stick of charcoal or graphite pencil or rubber. Yet is that all they are doing? Are they not touching the face too, the face, the nose, the hair, the eyes – so that they shut a little, the corners of the mouth? What is the relation between tracing and stroking, between an erasure and a caress? 

JOHN BERGER

Maggi Hambling was quoted as having this to say about drawing; ‘Drawing is an artist’s most direct and intimate response to the world. The touch of charcoal, graphite or ink on paper is full of endless possibilities. I try to distil the essence of a subject and capture the life-force of a moment.'

I first became interested in Maggi Hambling when she came to public notice because of her portraits of Max Wall. She was interviewed several times on TV and I thought she was an artist well worth following, as she seemed to take seriously the business of finding mass in space. She was searching for something and in asking Max Wall to be a subject I could see her looking for the drama of a life. Wall was both a comedian and a dramatic actor, especially when taking on Samuel Beckett. I had seen Wall's TV version of 'Waiting for Godot' and he used an awareness of his own physicality, to give the role a tragicomic depth. I presumed this was what Hambling had seen in him, a face and a body that were very physical, that had spent a lifetime on stage and that projected a unique theatrical presence. I felt that Hambling was presenting to us the theatre of the body, even if the only member of the audience was her own cat, Onde.

Max with Onde: 1981

She is particularly good when faced with mortality. Her drawings of her father below, reveal a delicate search for that life spark that we all have, even when it is dimmed with age. 

Father

Hambling's drawing of her mother when dead, is another attempt to find what lies beneath the surface of appearance. As Hambling herself put it, "The challenge is to touch the subject with all the desire of a lover" 2016.

My mother dead: 1988

Hambling has a rather theatrical personality, or at least it appears that way from the various interviews I have seen with her. Her cigarette often being used like a marl stick, a support that operates as a conversational prop. I read this as a type of nervousness, being very aware of my own anxiety as soon as anyone asks me to talk about my work. Most artists are visual thinkers which is why they stumble when it comes to translating what they do into words. (Except for David Hockney, who is always beautifully articulate.) 

She also looks a lot at the sea; she lives close to the coast and often draws and paints waves and spray and the hard to see shifts in form and energy that constantly come into and out of vision, as that huge body of water does the things it does. 

Hambling says this:

‘Most people know the life and death feeling when they look at the sea, it is so huge. Water is a metaphor for life. A wave approaches, then becomes solid before it dissolves, that’s pretty sexy. Someone once asked me why I keep painting waves and I replied I go on painting them because they are orgasms!'.

She recognises that we are all energy, that is all there is. The traces of charcoal or paint seismically record the energy of looking, as well as the energy of making and the energy of being. Perhaps because she is a popular artist, she is sometimes underrated, but I hold a special place for her in my heart and love her unremitting confrontation with that élan vital which she finds both in people and in the sea's waves. She has made a body of work that has communicated to me at least, her great joy in visualising life's experience and you cant ask much more of an artist.

See also:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02t7k03/making-their-mark-six-artists-on-drawing-maggi-hambling

Where stains and traces meet: To touch is to believe

Drawing as the trace of a touch

Drawing by touch

Paper, mobile phone screens and fingertips

Andrew Lister Drawing

Imagining the immune system

Page from an Edo-Period Chinese medical text

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

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

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

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

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

Electron micrograph of neutrophil extracellular traps and some trapped shigella bacteria

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

Ishii's images exhibited in public spaces

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

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

See also:

Macro and micro embodied networks

Maps made by our nervous systems

Visualising energy flow

What lies beneath

Absence, emptiness and the void