At some point this blog will be put forward as evidence that I have both thought deeply about what it is I do and that my thinking has been made easily available to other people.
I have several times during the writing of these blog posts referred to the making of maps. Whether these be of landscapes or the body, they are an important aspect of my thinking process. As long ago as 2017 I wrote about how map making could be a tool for enabling effective community ownership of both real and imagined events and I am still using thoughts about body mapping to realise imagined events and exploring how these imaginative maps might relate to more scientific visualisations. In my case I'm mapping my attempts at visualised feeling, off against more traditional mapping, that also includes various anatomical diagrams, from both western and eastern medical traditions. I. e. don't expect a direct link, as when you make a map of a town or landscape, where you can see an exact correspondence between what is mapped and the map. The relationship is felt, rather than understood logically.
Neurobiological maps can visualise how bodily signals from, for example, respiration, pain, temperature, and heartbeat are continually conveyed and integrated through distributed neural pathways but there is no single, fixed “body map”, each approach produces a different image type, here are some of them:
Pain Pathways
The nervous system
Neural pathways of interoception
Interoception embodied details
Pathways for interoceptive predictions in the brain
My drawings are another approach to an awareness that we have invisible feelings inside us and should never be understood as additional illustrations of neuroanatomy or as direct visual records of neural activity. They are better understood as aesthetic maps of interoceptive experience. Neurobiological systems continuously register and integrate signals from within the body, but conscious bodily feeling is not a simple read-out of those signals. It is shaped by attention, memory, emotion, expectation and the material circumstances of the moment. My drawings translate this changing, embodied field into visual relations: concentration and dispersal, pressure and release, opacity and permeability, rhythm and interruption. In this sense, the abstractions I make do not move away from bodily experience; they enable the felt dynamics of the body to be explored without reducing them to anatomical illustration.
This blog operates as a research archive as it documents the evolving concepts and material decisions behind the images. This post for instance is an attempt to make sense of mapping alongside the various images I have made of interoceptual experiences. These two images below can be seen as maps, the top one of the throat, just as a first breath is taken after constriction and the one below that of a feeling associated with the chest when it felt as if air could not be drawn in.
Images made in response to feelings associated with breathing restrictions
We can think of the felt body as being shaped not only by current sensations, but also by attention, memory, expectation, emotion, and context. The experiential map of breathlessness, for instance, can include compression, blockage, turbulence, panic, emptiness, rhythm and an eventual release. The 'mapping' of this experience being something I have attempted to do several times in the past. My abstract drawings translate these changing qualities into visual equivalents, such as density, pressure, broken boundaries, blurred edges, colour changes, tonal variation, layered marks, dispersal, constriction, flow, repetition, or shifts between figure and ground. They do not directly depict the throat, lungs, nerves, or the insula; they make the felt organisation of an experience available for reflection, but they do in their evolution acknowledge more scientific anatomical representations, as well as the representations of other cultures, images such as medical and anatomical diagrams from Tibetan and Chinese medical textbooks and anatomical flap books being significant to my thinking process not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible.
I see my drawings as evolving visual models of the lived body, what phenomenology calls the body as experienced, rather than the body measured. My research continues to be focused on the visualisation of interoceptual experience which concerns the ongoing sensing and interpretation of the body’s internal condition, including respiration, pain, temperature, fatigue, hunger and cardiac activity. Neurobiological accounts describe this as a distributed process: bodily signals are conveyed through multiple pathways and integrated into changing representations of bodily condition. What interests me is that these representations are not fixed pictures of organs inside the brain, and neither are they detached from memory, attention, emotion, expectation or the surrounding environment, therefore the evolution of the images I am making can intersect with any single aspect of this or any combination, such as how the external landscape someone may have experienced may effect the way they feel about the visualisation of an emotional experience. Therefore in these images you find what I think of as 'ghosts' of other representations, traces of trees, alongside geological forms or vegetation; traces of images of lungs, throats, stomachs or ribs, all becoming available at one time or another, as I attempt to make interiority visible. Just as landscapes hold traces of former features, memories of other times, and maps of those landscapes may have indications of those fading features.
Visualisation of an internal experience
My drawings should therefore not be understood as illustrations of neuroanatomy. They are artistic maps and images of the felt body: attempts to give visual form to the changing organisation of interoceptive experience. The relationship is analogical rather than anatomical. An image that looks a little like a broken rib may be used to evoke a certain recently felt pain, a twisted tube a stomach ache, which may in turn be accompanied by a dense, compressed area of mark-making that may evoke constriction or a broken line may evoke interruption; layered washes may evoke diffusion, uncertainty or overflow, figuration and non figuration being both used in the process of visualisation. Such formal choices do not identify a particular neural process or diagnose a bodily condition. They make available for reflection the felt dynamics through which a bodily state becomes meaningful.
An image made of emotions felt in the immediate aftermath of an operation
This distinction between the measurable body and the lived body has been central to the development of the work. In my post “Drawing on Experience,” the distinction between Körper—the body as object—and Leib—the body as subject or lived experience—provides a useful conceptual hinge. Neurobiological maps belong primarily to the first register: they model physiological processes. My drawings work in the second: they explore what it is like to inhabit a body whose internal condition has become unusually insistent. The two registers are connected, but neither can be reduced to the other.
Visualising stomachache
The movement between figuration and non figuration in my drawings is clarified in my article on Breathing. Early notebook drawings use ribs, throats, mouths and obstructions as provisional signs through which breathlessness can be articulated. Subsequent collages, watercolours and prints detach these forms from simple illustration. Ribs begin to overlap with tunnels, vaults and boats; remembered images, bodily sensation and material process become entangled. The later abstract images thus map a transition: not from bodily fact to fantasy, but from an immediate sensation to an expanded field of memory, metaphor and visual experimentation. The drawings record the work of how to visualise interoception, as much as they record the original sensation.
From 'Breathing'
My blog posts hopefully show that this is a sustained inquiry rather than an isolated response to illness. For instance my post “Drawing and healing traditions” questions the supposed neutrality of standardised pain images and argues for the importance of individual visual languages. Its most productive contribution is the recognition that an image can become a stable object to which a person may return, speak about and alter. This is consistent with the artwork’s role as a third object: it provides a shared focus without claiming that the artist, clinician or image possesses final knowledge of another person’s experience. This 'third object' however, also works as a type of externalised thought and as it finds symbolic connections with other things, it may also begin to operate as a fetish, a votive or a charm and thus become magical in its operation. “Drawing and healing” and “Anatomical flap books” extend the enquiry into a history of visual models of the body. Medical diagrams, Tibetan images, Chinese anatomical diagrams and flap books are significant here not as interchangeable systems of medical truth, but as examples of different visual cultures attempting to make interiority visible. The flap is especially important. It introduces depth, concealment, revelation and temporal sequence: the inner body is not simply displayed but progressively encountered. My cut-outs and layered surfaces develop this principle into an artistic method for approaching bodily experience as partial, revisable and never fully transparent reflections on 'how it is' when experiencing the confusing signals that come from inside our bodies.
Interoceptual portrait
“The inner and the outer” adds a further dimension, proposing that interoception, external perception and narrative continually inform one another. This helps explain why a visual language developed in relation to anxiety, pain or breathlessness may later reappear in work about migration or damaged cities. Such recurrence should not be presented as proof that a particular form has a universal bodily meaning. Rather, it establishes a personal and relational visual lexicon: a repertoire of forms whose meanings are tested, altered and situated through particular encounters.
From a series of images of broken cities
My continuing body of drawing, prints and ceramics holds within it expressions of bodily sensation, perception, memory, imagination and narrative, all linked through my own sensibility, without being forced into a single explanation, approach or style. It operates as a visual account of how the lived body becomes available to thought and how the visualisations made become further available as forms that can be used to make images of how I 'feel' about external experiences, such as the continuing trauma of wars or the stories of migrants told to me as I listen and draw. My current work with spinal injuries patients, being a locus around which new visual inventions are constantly having to be made, as people's internal feelings about their experiences are always unexpected and previously not visualised; therefore I have no existing models to work from and am forced to reinvent what it is I am visualising with each encounter; I am I suppose in this case always attempting to map the terra incognita of our invisible bodies. One area of the unknown that has recently raised its head has been the ability of the objects I make to become ensnared into the realm of magic; chaos magic in particular being of interest as it is a much more pragmatic approach to magical thinking and avoids arcane symbolism. I'm interested in this, just as I am in geometrical phycology or auras, the frayed edges of non scientific thinking being for myself threads that can be woven into the blanket of art, threads that are just as important an aspect of my research as to how art may affect people, as neurobiology or psychoanalysis.
I am also very aware that I'm getting older, fingers become stiff, my knees ache and I get tired, another body of experiences to feed into the mix. I'm very lucky in that I can still work and that I'm employed as a research fellow. This eases my subconscious mind, in that the situation tells me that I need to keep working if I am to remain useful. Keeping this blog being one aspect of the work, something I have been doing regularly, at least once a week for over 10 years now. So hopefully as a archive it begins to have traction.
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