Pathways for interoceptive predictions in the brain
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
