The search for an image

Urinary tract infection

The image above was put together today and it arrived out of a complex series of decisions and experiences. The most pressing was an attempt by myself to respond to a very painful urinary tract infection before I began to lose my memories of what had been felt. One of the most startling aspects of having the infection was the sudden appearance of blood in my urine. I was needing to urinate while in a hospital waiting area, eventually finding a toilet and instead of getting the relief of urinary pressure, I was shocked by the sight of red blood against the white of the ceramic toilet. I had had and still have pain in my left testicle, although due to antibiotics kicking in this is much reduced. This is linked to pains in my lower back. But the worst conjunction of pain was a combination of constipation and ache caused by the infection, alongside a need to both urinate and defecate, neither of which I could do. I have been making drawings and trying to respond to my feelings about this, and have been attempting to find an image that is for myself a summation of what I felt, something that compresses several days pain and worry into itself. Eventually I found that I could bring together two previously existing images to create a new one, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed the surprise for myself of the conjunction of a red soaked form with a black and white one. I had been using linocut recently, for the first time for years, so that the language of lino was still something I was in touch with or feeling inside. This was an image made as a guide or study for a lino print and was constructed digitally, and working on a computer was more of a necessity because I was working from bed. I needed an image that at some point within it squeezed everything into a narrow channel, an image that felt as if it was too full, an image that was spiky with pain, but above all an image that was about the dangling nature of an in the mind, damaged testicle. So there you have it. I will at some point make a proper linocut of this, but that will be dependent on access to facilities. But is it a good image? In fact, what is a good image? Does it do the job? Can it communicate in such a way that it seems to make sense, without it being simply an illustration? What as an image does it bring to the table? What is the 'extra' it offers?

Edward Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. It stated, "Art is...the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world. That is what I am doing both when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves and/or when I'm trying to visualise how I see any other aspects of my experience. But not always, sometimes I think I work backwards or upside down. I'm an artist driven to look for images that for one reason or another hold attention and break through to people, even in a world already 'image soaked'. But what do I mean by this? Again I suppose I'll have to circle around the idea in order to begin to tease out some sort of understanding, as these things are never straight forward. Perhaps I'll begin with Barthes.
Roland Barthes in his 1980 book 'Camera Lucida', used the word 'punctum' to describe an unintended, sharp detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pierces, wounds, or deeply moves the viewer on a personal level. I was very taken by this when I first read it and have often misused the word 'punctum' as a way of asking myself and others why any image, not just a photograph, may stick in the mind, or become memorable in some way. Barthes uses the word to refer to a specific element that "jumps out" of an image and 'pricks' the spectator's conscience or emotion. This is for him something unplanned and unexpected, as it relies entirely on the viewer's private history, memories, and associations. For instance a small detail in a photograph may cause you to remember an incident from your past that was very meaningful to you, but perhaps would not be to anyone else. Barthes contrasted this to what he called the studium; the polite, educated understanding of what the photograph is about and what the photographer intended, the punctum in comparison being the disruptive element that breaks through our detachment and striking the viewer with visceral, emotional intensity.
This is one aspect of the search for an image that I'm interested in but it is just that, an aspect, for instance some images hold your attention because of a intellectually stimulating conjunction of image and idea, such as those produced by Mark Tansey, others are simply uncanny (das Unheimliche) having that unsettling psychological feeling, as when something simultaneously feels deeply familiar and strangely alien, such as Meret Oppenheim's 'Object', her fur covered tea cup from 1936, which even after all these years of being exhibited as a classic surreal object, is an image that sticks in the mind. 

Meret Oppenheim 'Object',

However I cant use the tropes of Surrealism any more because they are of a type, or what I would now call if using the term beyond the world of photography, the 'studium'; the educated understanding of what the image is about. Finding an 'image' is a hard thing, because it is doubly hard to surprise yourself, especially when you are like myself someone who has been in the art business for a long time, and have therefore seen a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it is easier to be a naive artist, or perhaps not, as people sort of expect naive artists to behave in certain ways, thus beginning for myself, to eliminate the unexpected before I've even seen the work. When I recently went to look through a magazine focused on outsider art, my first thought was that it all looked like 'outsider art', somehow outsiders had begun to know what they should be doing as outsiders. I want to be an insider who can at a chosen time turn inside out. 

That old idea of Goethe's that art is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, can of course be inverted, the reproduction of the world that is inside me by means of the world outside me, is a pretty good description of how I sometimes work when I'm trying to visualise interoceptual experiences. Again I'm looking for something that sticks or pricks that image of 'normality' or expectation. It's perhaps the opposite of 'like'. It is not 'nice'. An image is always 'uncomfortable' in some way. Therefore it has to have an element of surprise. 

In order for the unexpected to be be revealed you have to get lost. To get lost implies action. You are doing, and this is very important, you need to do stuff in order to makes things happen, but you also don't need to 'know' what you are doing. Jasper Johns said, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." This is good and a starting point, but it only gets you so far. You also need to be able to pull out of the process in order to notice when something has happened. Johns also said, "I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort." I think this is more like it, something is found "to hold a kind of energy", an energy that is created by some sort of active juxtaposition of the elements that make up the image. There being some sort of friction that as it rubs off against itself, it sparks some sort of energy into life. If you can hold on to this, stick it down in some way, without smoothing it out, without finishing it off, well, then you might have an image. 

I was talking to my old friend Steve Carrick about this not long ago and he recommended that I read 'Unknowing' by Rebecca Forman, a book by its very title I could see that it was touching on the subject, but as yet I've not been able to find it. Perhaps he gave me a false trail, but if he did, it did lead to a thought in my head as to what this book could be about. 

I have followed the work of the painter Adrian Ghenie for a while, and have found him a very good example of an image maker. He 'stalks' his images in various ways, sometimes needing to use collage to stir things up and give him glimpses of the unexpected, but he can also use traditional drawing. 

Adrian Ghenie: Detail

Adrian Ghenie: Mobile phone user

During the time of Covid19 like all of us he was isolated, so he drew and one thing he drew were people with mobile phones. He drew them over and over again, rubbing out, redrawing, looking for what they could be. Strangely as the drawings progressed the one constant, the mobile phone in a hand, became the least interesting thing, it was what was doing the listening that was interesting; the who it was who was interacting with the phone had become a discovery. I realised it was as if he heard a phone ringing, and even though it wasn't his, he picked it up and used it as a portal to find an image for a portrait drawing. You sometimes have to do stuff like that to catch an image off guard. 

Urinary tract infection

These are the first 7 drawings I made in response to how I felt about my urinary infection. They are on small A6 sheets of thick paper, again small so that I could do them from bed, this time sitting on it's edge, using a large A3 sketchbook as a table. As is often my want, I was using a dip in pen and ink to establish the idea.

I then followed that session with another using a brush and various coloured liquids, this time slowing down and concentrating on initially one image. 

Coloured image

This was too complicated but pointed to some thoughts about flowing liquids. 

Testicle weight

I went back to the earlier images and picked an idea out that suggested more testicle weight. I started to react to the horror I had when seeing blood in my urine. So I took another tack.

Ist step peeing blood

At this point I returned to using the computer and began processing in Photoshop. 

The first image that seemed to be on its way to being an image

The image immediately above was the first one to intrigue me, this was the last one to emerge directly out of the drawings done as an attempt to capture the feeling tone I had in my body/mind about the situation I was experiencing. I had been in a lot of pain, I was worried as to what it might all mean and the sight of blood in my urine had frightened me. 

I returned to some images working by hand and others I began to edit on the computer. At this point I'm not worried as to the authenticity of working on paper or computer, I'm simply searching for an image.

Pain and heat

For instance I might as in this case, go back directly to a hand made image, scan it and then look to see what happens if certain colours are changed. In this case the coloured image above, is adjusted so that the warm colours are brought out around the groin area. The warmth of pain is one aspect I'm trying to visualise. 

As I was now working on my computer, I had easy access to older images, and began to look through some of them, knowing that I had made some before that might work. What I didn't realise was that I had already made separate images of the final elements I would end up using, but by letting these first sets of drawings go where they needed to go, they had established in my mind an idea of what was needed. Their materiality had allowed a thought to jell and they had triggered memories of recent images. I eventually found one which was of work done to prepare for a linocut, (this seemed a better resolution of my stomach/body) and the other of a shape that was at one point a cutout that I inserted into a much larger image, The point being that it was of an extension, something that I was feeling the testicles were. Notice no penis, in the night the blood seemed to flow directly out of me. Drawings of interoceptual experiences are not to do with any sort of accurate anatomy. The resulting images are neither literal representations of the body, nor simply illustrations, they are materialisations of a process of encounter. I'm now going back to images made on paper.

Peeing blood

See also:

Hopper, Seurat and the study

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders

Mathematics, rightness and underlying beauty

Composition within landscape painting

The drawings of Henri Michaux 

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.

A highway code for pain

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

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

Existing pain scale

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

Highway code road markings

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

The beginnings of a new pain chart

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

Pain chart: Stage two: After critique from patients

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

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

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

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

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

Coda

I was recently at an open day at the hospital I work in and one of the people manning the Hollister and fittleworth commercial stand, pointed out that the work I have been doing in this area was very close to some work they had been looking at. In particular they had developed an emotional wheel to help people to understand how to express feeling.

I was kindly given a copy of a handout to look at, which had been developed by Charlene Douglas, 'The Intimacy Coach' who had based it on the work of Robert Plutchik, someone I had also been looking at to develop my own work. It was really useful and heartening to see that others had also seen a need for this type of support when trying to get people to confront their emotional condition. In particular the handout asks three questions of anyone trying to use the wheel.

It suggests that people take time to think about how they emotionally feel. Then they are to try to identify three to five emotions, (found at the centre of the wheel), that relate to what they are feeling. Once these emotions are identified, they next move to the second ring of words that are all chosen to help describe how emotions make someone feel. For instance a 'happy' emotion might make you feel optimistic. Finally a user should move onto the outer circle of words, which are chosen to help people identify why they might feel this emotion. Someone might for instance feel optimistic because happiness made them feel hopeful.  

The example used on the handout I was given was 'Fearful, scared and anxious'. Because this chart was for people who were going into hospital for treatment, the situation was linked to an imaginary someone who was, 'Frightened to leave the house and socialise again. Worried about recovery and further treatment.' 

Once these feelings have been identified the next step is to seek help from others, therefore finally the handout suggests writing down responses to the chart and after asking oneself the following questions, to share the answers verbally with someone of a trustful nature. 

1: What is making you feel this way?

2: What thoughts are driving this feeling?

3: How do you notice you are behaving as a result of feeling this way?

4: What do you need from your partner/friend/family to support you to feel better?

5: How have you coped with this emotion in the past? What has / hasn't worked very well in the past for you when you feel this way?

The emotional wheel

A simplified version by Abby VanMuijen

There has been a lot of work done in this area and in particular the artist Abby VanMuijen has tried to simplify the emotional wheel and relate it back to the body, a model that I will look at myself, to see how I can do something similar.

The body and emotion: Abby VanMuijen

​

References:

Abby VanMuijen website:https://www.avanmuijen.com/watercolor-emotion-wheel 

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

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

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

See also:

Lines in the road

Seeing and feeling

Is drawing a language?
Angles vision and sound

The emotional line

A link to an earlier post that introduced Robert Plutchik's emotional wheel.

The inner and the outer

The tree of landscape embedded into the soil of the body

I'm often asked what the relationship is between my visualisation of interoception, my drawings made in response to direct external perception, such as landscapes and portraits and my visualisation of narratives that I have extracted from the stories told to me by people of their life events. They are in fact all very closely related. In the digital print above I have tried to merge all three, which on reflection wasn't the best idea as there are now too many approaches to an idea in the same image; but it does perhaps indicate something about how the three flow between each other. 

Interoception, exteroception and story telling are types of sensory perception and narratives that help us understand the world we exist within. Interoception includes sensing signals from within the body, such as changes in temperature, pain, or fatigue. It also includes the sensations that accompany emotions, like fear, excitement, or surprise and provides feedback about how the body is functioning, by signalling hunger, thirst, or sleepiness. Interoception connects our minds with our bodies. Exteroception is centred on the processing of information that we perceive as coming from the external world, and it is focused on how we use the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to form predictions as to what is happening out there. In order to 'read' these sensations we often give shape to them by cloaking them in narratives. E.g. "I feel really thirsty, there must have been too much salt in that meal." We use stories to make sense of the information coming in to us, both as a filter and as an ethical or world view framework. All of which, the conscious mind receives as qualia, the phenomenal qualities of our experiences. 

The feelings that I try to visualise that sit within the body are invisible but are powerful shapers of how we understand and react to the world. The more I find narratives used to communicate these feelings, the more these narratives could I'm sure be used alongside the narratives that emerge from my own direct external perceptions and be fused with other people's stories. For instance a certain visual quality that I have developed and associated with an interoceptual investigation of anxiety, may at another time be used within an image about migration, so that the anxiety of the storyteller is accounted for. But there is something else, something perhaps even more important, and that is sometimes it's time to tell yourself a new story. So can hope be nurtured within anxiety? Can a belief in a better future be found in the visualisation of pain? 

Detail: textural surface used to visualise a ruined city

I was recently told of dreams of destroyed cities, including a future bombed to rubble Leeds, where both myself and the storyteller live. As I attempted to realise these dreams of cities, the textural surfaces that I developed to visualise the ruins had a particular value that I had previously used to depict inner emotions. The broken buildings were in effect being visualised as if they were broken bodies. Both the non figurative somatic images and narrative sets of figurative images, were in effect reflections of my self awareness of my own consciousness, as I attempted to work with what had been communicated to me. However I didnt want to make images of despair, in order to make them useful I tried to make images of ambiguous possibilities, things of hope. They are most importantly, attempts to materialise thoughts and our bodies are the first indicator of how we do this. We stand tall when feeling confident and fold inwards when anxious, therefore the underlying structures of art forms and key images, also need to reflect this. 

What goes on inside someone's mind is often not what you would expect and the internal narrative that responds to outside interests and appearances, as much shapes those things as is shaped by them. Inner and outer worlds are entwined, the shape of consciousness being found both within the mind and the body, as well as the world itself. A gradual dissolving of the barriers between external 'reality' and inner subjectivity is, I feel, sometimes a very useful thing, as it reminds us of how we swim in a sea of our own subjectivity. 

In psychology this inner and outer reality is communicated in terms of the sub-conscious and the conscious and I'm very aware that that duality still seems to make a lot of sense, therefore an integrated understanding of interoception and exteroception is what I'm trying to work with. 

Detail of an image of ruined buildings

Detail of an image visualising an interoceptual experience 

Just as in the 'real' world, the closer you get to the surface of a drawing, the more you become aware of a jumble of abstract forms. As we approach surfaces with subatomic visualisation techniques, they become even more abstract. The human body is not that dissimilar in topographic form to a torus (donut type form) and you don't think of a donut's hole as being separated from the surrounding space that the donut exists within. We are one contiguous surface, our outside skin, becomes the inside of the mouth or the anus, the donut hole being the tube that connects the two ends. So in effect inside and outside are in reality one. Formally this relates to how electromagnetic fields are then produced by our bodies. Electromagnetic fields are examples of those forces that we cant see and one of these is the weak nonlinear electromagnetic field that surrounds us and is a product of the fact that our cells need to communicate via electro/chemical processes. 

The heart and the brain are well known as organs that generate ion currents. The current from the heart muscle, when measured with electrodes on the skin, can be used to produce an electrocardiogram (ECG); the same current produces a magnetic field that mirrors our torus shaped torso, which when measured, can be used to produce a magnetocardiogram (MCG).

The heart's magnetosphere

In his 1975 paper "Magnetic Fields of the Human Body," David Cohen details the detection and measurement of weak magnetic fields produced by the human body, primarily from the electrical activity of organs like the heart and brain, demonstrating that these magnetic fields are measurable using sensitive instruments like superconducting quantum interference devices or SQUIDS; that is as long as the measurements take place in a heavily shielded environment. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies brain activity in relation to its magnetic field and it produces images of the fields explored such as the ones below.

A Magnetocardiogram

As far back as the 18th century, people believed that you could cure illness with magnetism. Dr Franz Mesmer advocated the use of “mesmerised” water and iron filings, to remove obstacles to the body's energy flow. What was at one time conjecture, has now been revisited as part of a growing awareness of the importance of the body's internal communication systems, Our present day awareness of the body and energy flow is however still being informed by the Indian tradition of chakras. The chakra's are often visualised as circular or wheel like forms, (Chakra = Sanskrit, "wheel") and they were first introduced to the West by C. W. Leadbeater, who I have referred to in the past as one of the authors of 'Thought Forms' an important influence on the development of abstraction. Chakras are understood as seven vortices of energy, that are located at various points along the spine. They are both physical and spiritual centres of energy focus and the key issue in relation to wellbeing, is that these energy flows can become blocked and when they are illness is the result. I.e. if the body's internal communication systems are not working properly, we will become physically ill. Here we can see a clear link between the images produced as magnetocardiograms and those produced to visualise chakra energy. In both instances, illness can be read as a problem related to energy being blocked or not flowing properly.

C. W. Leadbeater: Image of a chakra energy flow: 1927

I'm doing some work visualising pain at the moment. The more I talk to people who have had spinal injuries and attempt to visualise their interoceptual feelings of pain, the more I begin to feel that we collectively have an intuitive grasp of these issues. Some of the images that are emerging are not that dissimilar to those produced by Leadbeater, in particular when he was trying to illustrate body auras for his 1902 text, 'Man, visible and invisible'.

He of course had some pretty strange ideas but was a man of his time, with stereotypical views of what he thought of as primitive man and associated ideas such as the differences between 'savage' and 'civilised'. However his visual difference between the 'mental' body aura and the 'astral' body aura is an interesting one, and some of his other visualisations of invisible forces, such as a sudden rush of affection, still feel as if they do touch upon something, even if only as a hesitant guess at a possibility. 

Illustrations of auras from Leadbeater's 'Man, visible and invisible' 1902

The repeated downward sloping curve of the 'Miser' and 'Deep Depression', reminded me of what I had written earlier on Watteau and the inverted hemisphere line. 

The inverted hemisphere line. 

In Leadbeater's auras, as set out in 'Man, visible and invisible', intense anger and the shock of fear are visually translated by the zig-zag. Anger in particular feeling as if it is the zig-zag of the lightening strike that is being called to mind. Several people I have spoken to about how their pain feels have used the image of lightening strikes to get an idea across to me of how intense and sharp a pain might be. No matter how hesitant, I do feel as if there is something worthwhile here to continue exploring. 

Perhaps I'm far too subjective about these things, but as what I'm trying to do is to find some sort of balance between objectivity and subjectivity, it is probably a normal response in a time of the dominance of scientific method, to worry about moving away from objective measurement. But I am after all an artist not a scientist, and as such I want to find things out in my own way, even if it means taking several steps back into time, in order to think about how I can move forward. 

An emotional landscape of traumatic pain

References

Besant and Leadbeater: Thought forms

Cohen, D. (1975) Magnetic fields of the human body. Physics Today, 28(8), pp.34-43.

Kuman, M. (2018) Our Weak Nonlinear Electromagnetic Field that Rules Everything in the Body is Emotionally Sensitive: Journal of Complementary Medicine & Alternative Healthcare October 8(2)

Leadbeater, C.W., (2014) Man, visible and invisible. London: Quest Books.

Leadbeater, C.W. (2013) The chakras. London: Quest Books

See also:

Macro and micro embodied networks

Eye music Includes a reflection on Besant and Leadbeater's 'Thought Forms'

The emotional line

The zig-zag

Qualia

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Benjamin Brett and geometric psychology 

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The inner body up close