Life drawing as contact improvisation

A fast biro sketch made in my notebook to remind students that the model stands in space.

I recently hosted a celebratory life drawing session in honour of the achievements of an ex student of mine. He has for a while now been holding life drawing classes in Hull and has developed a core following of students, but is now moving on and another tutor is going to take over the classes. He wanted to mark the occasion in some way and so he invited me to teach a session in recognition of how a metaphorical baton is handed on from one artist educator to another. This reminded me of an another event I was invited to participate in back in 2017. The 'Fully Awake' Exhibition held in Glasgow at 'House for an Art Lover', was focused on the legacy of Fine Art teachers and I was chosen for my contributions to an understanding of the processes behind idea and image generation. In particular my contribution to opening out possibilities as to how stories can be translated into a visual simultaneity. In this exhibition I represented an older generation of art tutors and I was chosen by Steve Carrick, then Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chester, as an important influence on his own practice, and he in turn chose one of his students as being someone who was themselves now carrying on the baton. The exhibition concept had been put together by Sean Kaye and Ian Hartshorne another two connections from my time working on the Foundation course at Leeds College of Art, Ian was a past student and Sean took over as head of the fine art strand, when I was pulled out of teaching to undertake management tasks, something that I spent a couple of very uncomfortable years doing. 

In Hull, I felt I needed to do something that reflected how things had changed in relation to life drawing practices and that there was now much more awareness of the role of the model in the situation and I wanted to put on a session therefore that gave the model more agency and that brought the drawers into a three way dialogue, (drawers, tutor and model), that broke through the myth of life room objectivity. 

The life model had decided to wear a thick black dressing gown made of a wooly material, which made him sweat. So I decided to use this as a starting point for the session. He was shaking his hands in some sort of attempt to cool himself down, so I asked him to just go through the moves he was making as cool down exercises and to now think of these actions as the focus for the session. He had a towel with him and he didn't know where to put it, so we agreed he might as well carry it over his shoulder, as he would normally do if he wasn't modeling.  Whilst doing this I also engaged the drawers with their own body languages as they began setting up to draw. I asked them what they were thinking about and started to bring the model into the conversation. He told a story about how during one class he wished the session would end quickly because a nice looking woman was 'looking at him', which meant that he was starting to think that he might become aroused. He made it to the end of the session he said with relief and he had therefore decided that he must try to think of nothing when he was modelling in the future. His story reminded me of a life room conversation from back in the 1970s. I was as a young man hosting a life drawing session at the Swarthmore Adult Education Centre in Leeds, when the model came up to me and said, 'That man is looking at me', and I knew exactly what she meant. All the other drawers were engaged with the task in hand, which was trying to locate the figure in space, but this particular man was hardly drawing, he was looking at her. I then had the difficult job of informing him that it was better if he left the session and that I could tell that he wasn't capable of working in the required way, which was essential if students were going to progress into higher education. This was in fact an embroidered falsehood, only a few of the students in the group wanted to progress, but it worked and he left with a refund that came out of my own pocket. I wonder with hindsight if I could have handled the situation better? That story being a reminder to myself of how difficult life drawing sessions were and still are, in relation to the implied sexuality of the situation. I can't remember the number of times that some anonymous man I have met in a pub or waiting for a train, has grunted some guttural noise in response to the fact I had let them know I was an artist. In their mind all they could think of was that artists spend most of their time gazing at naked women. It's a sad indictment of our culture that this comic stereotype is still in place.    

Back in the room booked out for the life drawing session, I began miming the various stances now taken by the drawers as they set up to draw. I suggested that one set of poses the model could take in the future could be based on these mimes. I was of course asking the students whether or not the life class could be used to reflect upon the situation itself? 

The next issue was to expand on an idea of figure drawing as some form of contact improvisation. I worked with the model to get him to undertake a range of classic poses, poses I would first take up and then he would if asked copy.  As he moved, I moved an imaginary drawing implement with my hand, sometimes sweeping my arm in an arc and at other times twisting my wrist movements to make tiny hand turns. My drawing movements were echoing his body movements. If he held his arm out, I would extend mine, my imaginary drawing implement tracing an invisible line in the air as I moved. We then looked at how people were standing or sitting in relation to the situation and I asked how in their minds they inhabited their own bodies and whether they imaginatively could inhabit other people's bodies. Drawing in this case, could become a sort of 'inhabitation' of another's form. We also discussed mirroring, the way that we copy body movements of those we encounter, the classic being how we fold arms or cross legs in response to our perception of others doing the same. 

Eventually we began drawing, and for the whole session I simply asked the model to continue with his cooling down routine, breaking every 15 minutes to ask questions of the various student approaches to their drawings. I took the approach of every picture tells a story. The drawings reflected the various abilities of those in the room in relation to measurement, control of medium etc. Several people still starting with drawing a head and finding as the drawing went on that they couldn't get the feet in. So lots of basic stuff to teach like how to measure, as we went on, but what these attempts did highlight were certain psychological implications in relation to how we see each other. I pointed out that in 'normal' conversation with another person we would not look at their feet and that we would concentrate on their face to check out whether or not we were in communication. However when one person in the room takes their clothes off, immediately the conversation is warped. Some broke their drawings down into flat areas, others developed centralised images, some were focused on mark others on tone. Each approach suggested a different narrative about relationships and how they could be visualised through drawing. 

It felt that by the end of the session everyone was more aware of the possibilities for change in relation to the way that situations of this sort were constructed and that the key issue of how to make images of another human being was opened up anew for the students. In particular the man who was going to take over the life drawing sessions in the future took part and I would hope that what went on helped him to think through how he will host his sessions in the future. 

We have been aware of these issues for some time and in particular Nina Kane unpicked many of the narratives surrounding life room practice when she worked for the Leeds College of Art Adult Education department during the time when I was its manager. I thought her work with the Leeds Art Gallery and its collection was exemplary and her reflections are still available. (A link to her work can be found at the end of this post.) 

This was also a time (I think it was 2008) when the management at the college decided that life drawing would no longer be supported as a key component of the art curriculum and the life room was discontinued and the space put to other uses. The idea of continuing to fund a contested space was perhaps in the minds of a management driven by finance, as well as being faced with many mainly feminist voices calling for life drawing to be removed from the curriculum, difficult. Instead of using the situation to open out the issues as Nina had done, it was much easier just to drop what was a quite expensive activity, as both a tutor and a model had to be paid for, as well as changing facilities made available. There were also incoming health and safety regulations that highlighted potential dangers in having a nude person on the premises, regulations that demanded answers to hypothetical questions that made life too complicated for the average part-time tutor. So having been employed by a principal who insisted that I be able to draw from life and teach life drawing, I had now become one of the last people to ever undertake any life drawing within the institution. 

Things were so different when I started teaching in January 1975. Frank Lisle, the then principal, (in an earlier role teaching in Bradford he taught David Hockney to draw), employed three full-time models, Ann, Mavis and Rosalie. Life drawing was central to all the courses and I was employed, not just to teach printmaking but also to teach life drawing on Fridays to Foundation students. I'm again reminded of those times, because a film crew are in the university at the moment, developing a documentary about Lem Mierins' life. Lem was the inspiration for the well known comedian Leigh Francis' comic character Avid Merrion. Francis was taught by Lem as was the director behind this documentary, Phil Dean and as I'm one of the last members of staff that would have worked alongside Lem, I was interviewed. Lem is remembered for his language, a mixture of Latvian and English grammar, his iron will that he imposed on the life room and his very dapper appearance. He taught students how when drawing to reduce the model down to as few lines as possible. These lines had to be smoothly drawn and the model had to be placed perfectly on the page. I used to watch him draw, every line controlled, never a wobble and if it was Mavis, he had a model that had a shape that fitted perfectly into an imperial sized sheet of cartridge paper. (In 1975 metric paper sizes were introduced, but it took a few years for paper stocks to reflect this and we worked on imperial sized paper up until the later part of the 1970s.) He was an abstractionist and the life drawing studio was where he abstracted human beings down into formal essences. Then once your eyes were trained, you could apply this skill in other ways, such as in the precision kerning of the space between two letter forms. (This was in the days before computer typesetting) As you might guess we disagreed fundamentally on our relative approaches to drawing. I began with searching for space and then mass, he looked for flat pattern and formal organisation. Neither of us was at that time questioning why all three life models were women and it was accepted that whoever ran the life class, their philosophy would be the controlling factor. Things have though changed over the years; in Leeds in particular, the influence of Griselda Pollock's work was huge and as early as 1976/7, I remember Kate Russell, one of the Foundation staff, coming back from one of Griselda's sessions over at the University of Leeds totally fired up with the need to bring Feminist ideas into the course thinking. 

Lem Mierins: Life drawing circa 1978ish

Lem Mierins: 

Even after all these years, I still have the need to look at and draw naked people. I understand that people want to know how to visualise the various ways that we sit or stand and how the muscles and bones within our bodies come together to support us. But most of that understanding could be developed by using a clothed other person. When I undertook the 'copying other people's body movements workshop' hosted by the choreographer Katja Heitmann, the fact that everyone was clothed was an integral part of the way that people moved. Clothing and body movement are entwined. Perhaps by beginning any life drawing session with a 'how to get to know another person's body' set of dance type exercises, we could begin the process of 'knowing' another person's body in a different way. If someone really needed a longer time to look at a body, they could sit themselves in front of a large mirror in the privacy of their own space and then set about analysing how to draw that wonderful complexity we call the human body, from their own image. But at some point, someone will want and perhaps need, to draw from a naked other human. 

Life classes are still being held in libraries and pubs and education institutions right across the city of Leeds, and I am aware that at times I feel the need to practice my ability to render the wonderfully complex form of the human body and that these types of classes offer an opportunity for me to do that. But I wish that more thought could be put into what the situation entails, as I believe that if that was done, eventually much more interesting drawings would emerge. I would hope that images that had far more to do with how we communicate through our bodies, would evolve out of a situation that was less about a myth of objectivity and more about the very subjective and emotional struggle we all have to communicate with each other. 

See also:

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Kimon Nicolaides and the natural way to draw

Life drawing: a reflection

Drawing as translation

The art of the life model: Nina Kane

The art of the life model: Nina Kane a further report

Dancing and Occult Chemistry

I'm very aware that as I make a drawing my body performs a series of movements that could be thought of as a type of dance routine. Back in the 1960s when I worked at the steelworks, we had a time and motion expert come in to analyse the various jobs that we did and in that analysis I for the first time saw the possibilities of some sort of 'work dance', one that however had military overtones.

Motion efficiency study by Frank Gilbreth, c. 1914.

Frank Gilbreth was a pioneering management consultant, who invented the use of cyclegraphs as a way to improve the efficiency of repetitive tasks. The image above could both be used as an example of how a relentlessly monitored production line could dehumanise people and as an idea for a type of choreography and its documentation. As I sit at my drawing desk, I'm sure a time-lapse image of my movements would not be that dissimilar, except for the matter of my taking a break whenever I want to.

Movement and its understanding can be both a form of control, (think army marching displays as in the Edinburgh military tattoo) and an expression of freedom.

Military geometry 

At a sub-atomic level all is movement and one of the earliest twentieth century attempts to describe the invisible structures that lie beneath perceived reality was Besant’s and Leadbeater’s 'Occult Chemistry', published in London by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1908. I have mentioned Besant and Leadbeater in previous posts, mainly because of their interest in visualising thought forms and their book 'Occult Chemistry' subtitled, 'Clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements', is a fascinating example of how an awareness of eastern religious practices was at that time beginning to influence western approaches to visualising the unknown. 

From: Occult Chemistry

This is how they describe visualising a hydrogen atom in chapter two:

'Turning to the force side of the atom and its combinations, we observe that force pours in the heart-shaped depression at the top of the atom, and issues from the point, and is changed in character by its passage; further, force rushes through every spiral and every spirilla, and the changing shades of colour that flash out from the rapidly revolving and vibrating atom depend on the several activities of the spirals; sometimes one, sometimes another, is thrown into more energetic action, and with the change of activity from one spiral to another the colour changes.'

From Occult Chemistry: The complexities of a hydrogen atom

I was fascinated by the relationship between atomic structure and the organs of the body and tried to develop their atom image as a beating heart. Edwin Babbitt had also proposed an atom of this form in his text "Principles of Light and Colour," His model of the atom was a globular structure composed of spirals and spirillae, with three movements: rotation, orbital motion, and pulsation and I think it would have been Babbitt's idea that was used as a model for Besant and Leadbeater’s diagrams. 

Atom heart dynamo

The visualisations of Besant and Leadbeater, as well as Babbitt, in some ways resemble those eventually developed in relation to Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure and the related laws of quantum mechanics; initially these structures were visualised as electrons in orbit, then they became cloud-like and illustrated as fuzzy-edged three-dimensional geometries, such as vibrating spheres, misty toruses or out of focus dumbbells. I suspect that our ideas of the sub-atomic world will look like something very different in another hundred years time. 

A radium atom visualised using Bohr’s theory of atomic structure

Besant and Leadbeater stated, “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”. “It is" they further stated, "formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This reflects some of our earliest human ideas of religion; ideas that arose out of the contemplation of what happens when someone or something 'stops', when movement comes to an end and things die. 

We now tend to think of the sub-atomic world as being composed of wave energies, energy and movement being conjoined. As living beings, in order to respond to experiences, we rely on the constant movement of our sensors in relation to what is out there; we experience this movement as 'life' and its expression is at its most heightened as dance. 

The passepied an old French court dance. 

The structure of the passepied is not unlike the spiral structures that thread through the atoms as envisioned by Besant and Leadbeater. As the body moves through three dimensional spaces, it forms interlocking wave structures, that if for a moment are realised as diagrams they can be seen as similar to the visualisations produced for Occult Chemistry.

Choreography: Laban diagrams and William Forsythe's Space Trace Notation

A visualisation of the sodium atom from Occult Chemistry

Figure in a dodecahedron

I am always looking for ways to link the various threads that arrive within my weekly musings on drawing, searching for how I can come to some sort of personal understanding about what I'm thinking about. I have recently found an article by David A. Becker which has helped me to see how certain strands could be linked together. Music, brain structure, chemistry and geometry are all fused together in his article, 'A Peculiary Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced "House of Blues": The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas'.  He wrote this abstract for his article in the journal 'Symmetry'.

'A bilaterally symmetrical convex dodecahedron consisting of twelve quadrilateral faces is derived from the icosahedron via a process akin to Fuller’s Jitterbug Transformation. The unusual zygomorphic dodecahedron so obtained is shown to harbor a bilaterally symmetrical jazz/blues harmonic code on its twelve faces that is related to such fundamental music theoretical constructs as the Circle of Fifths and Euler’s tonnetz. Curiously, the patterning within the aforementioned zygo-dodecahedron is discernibly similar to that observed in a ventral view of the human brain. Moreover, this same pattern is arguably evident during development of the embryonic pharynx. A possible role for the featured zygo-dodecahedron in cephalogenesis is considered. Recent studies concerning type II cadherins, an important class of proteins that promote cell adhesion, have generated data that is demonstrated to conform to this zygo-dodecahedral brain model in a substantially congruous manner.' 

(Becker 2012)

I have previously commented on the way that bi-lateral symmetry has affected our relationship with the world and how we think about it, especially as someone that spends many hours drawing on bilaterally symmetrical sheets of paper. This symmetry is of course reflected in the layout of our nervous systems and in the context of brain connectivity van den Heuvel and Sporns have posited that the human brain contains a bilaterally symmetrical group of twelve major interconnected neuronal hubs that Becker (2012) has linked to our propensity to respond to particular musical rhythms. A relationship illustrated beautifully by John Coltrane's drawing of a circle of fifths that I used in a previous post, as an illustration of the relationship between rhythm and our spatial understanding.

John Coltrane. Untitled (circle of fifths), 1967

Many years ago I used to tap dance, and I recently found an old pair of my tap shoes in the basement, perhaps its time to revisit my inner body rhythms and to see if my feet have more awareness of these issues than my hands. When I began teaching I noticed some of the older staff wore brogue shoes with solid heels and when they strode out into the studio, they used the sound of their clip-clop rhythm, to both get immediate attention and in Patrick Oliver's case to teach students about the relationship between rhythm and space. What I do feel is that it is the bilaterally symmetrical body that 'knows' these things and that the head follows slowly behind. In the head's embryonic development its pharyngeal arches, pouches, and clefts, are derived from the implications of formal possibilities of the icosahedron and its cells will remember that, especially when the head twists around as the body is dancing. 

UV Map* of my bilaterally symmetrical body made using Maya

*A UV Map is a type of vertex map that stores vertical and horizontal positions on a 2D texture. The letters U (Horizontal) and V (Vertical) denote the axes of the 2D texture because X, Y and Z are used to denote the axes of the 3D space. (Vertex = graph)

I look at the map of myself above and see the possibilities of laying it over a star chart. This week I'm designing cosmic tableware and am thinking about what the tablecloth should look like and am getting close to an idea that welds together drawings of the curved time/space that is gravity and the body map. 

Space time curvature

The cheese platter has already been made in the form of a moon sitting on a sun. 

Soup bowls

Design for batik tablecloth

This is another one of my tranculment ideas. The point being that the things which we surround ourselves with in 'ordinary life' can become entries into a more mythic everyday.

From the micro to the macro is another theme that seems to run through my ideas and as I work through this stuff in my head I remember something else. In the large wall drawing 'Planetary Dance' by Anna Halprin, she presented rituals consisting of explanatory diagrams with accompanying text. Back in 2017 at the Venice Biennale Halprin was offering us a chance to help heal the world by joining its peoples together in a healing set of dances. I took a couple of photographs of the diagrams she drew and they sort of close the circle of my thoughts today on these things and help me link up my various ramblings.

Anna Halprin

At one point in their dancing, participants had to blow breath through their hands into the sky and when they do this we are linked back to the chemistry of breath, the exchange of gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide, that takes place between the body and its environment during respiration, but that's another story.

References

Becker, D.A., (2012) A Peculiarly Cerebroid Convex Zygo-Dodecahedron is an Axiomatically Balanced “House of Blues”: The Circle of Fifths to the Circle of Willis to Cadherin Cadenzas. Symmetry, 4(4), pp.644-666.

Morrisson, M. S. (2009) Occult Chemistry and the Theosophical Aesthetics of the Subatomic World RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, 34(1), pp.86-97.

van den Heuvel, M.P.; Sporns, O. (2011) Rich-Club organization of the human connectome. Journal of Neuroscience 31, 15775–15786. 

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Horizontality and the body

Body cartography

The micro and the macro

Jorinde Voigt: Drawing as abstraction and notation

Body cartography

Human embryonic development

I have been looking at the work of the body cartography project. This is something that has been underway for some time but I have only just discovered it. Perhaps this is because I have only recently begun to look more closely at how dancers work, however as artists of the body, they are finely tuned to somatic experiences. Body maps have interested me for a while, and the body cartography project bases its focus on the developing of experiential tools that are derived from somatics, (sensation-based movement practices), dance and choreography. The background scientific research they have done, because they are focused on movement and change rather than static facts, is focused upon embryology; the branch of animal biology that studies the prenatal development of gametes, fertilisation as well as the development of embryos and fetuses. 

Carla Bottiglieri, a project researcher for the body cartography project, has stated;

"With embryology, anatomy ceases being the static, achieved geography of structures – a stillness that is primarily borrowed from the cadaveric inertia of the dissected body – and reveals what moved and still moves our seemingly silent interiors. Learning through embodiment may start from a choreographic-like mind, the one that takes images as maps, maps as diagrams, and everything as scores. In the case of embryology, the term score seems almost to be closer to music than to dance, and in fact lines and directions describing the all too busy movement of the forming embryo, in order to be “correctly” read, need kinematics being paralleled with dynamics: a play of intensities, rhythms, simultaneous events, different speed rates."

This statement immediately drew my attention, because I have for a while been working to develop a way of making images about interoceptual experiences that are not reliant upon static anatomy illustrations from medical textbooks, or some sort of fixed map that tries to pin down where things occur. I have been looking for various ways to open up my own and others awareness of the body's kinetic inner perception of its own sensations, which hopefully might bring about a more nuanced sense of our presence in the world and the experience of being.

Embryology Sections

Tree with root system

The study of embryology also includes an awareness of the evolutionary history of the human body and the bodies and forms of other living creatures. For instance our cranial bones are developed in the mesenchymal tissue surrounding the head end of the notochord; a process that begins in the foetus by the end of the first month of pregnancy. Most of the cranial vault and a portion of the base of the skull arise as membranous bone. However there are two types of evolutionary origins or paths that are operating here and they occur simultaneously and complementary with each other in the formation of the completed cranium. We are a type of primate, and the development of the primate skull consists of neural and visceral (branchial) components. The neural portion consists of the brain case and the capsular enclosure of the special sense organs. The visceral portion is derived from the embryonic counterparts of the branchial arches, which, in fishes and tailed amphibia, support the oral and pharyngeal regions. These visceral components function in respiration and mastication. The formation of the primate palate being an innovation which permits infants to suck and the adult to chew while respiration continues. The neural and visceral components of the branchial arches include Branchial motor neurons that are located in the brainstem and which supply with nerves the muscles formed by the branchial arches. The branchial arches are a series of six paired arches that form in the head and neck of an embryo during the fourth week of gestation. The arches are made up of four tissue components: cartilage, aortic arch artery, nerve, and muscle and they will eventually develop into the face, neck, and oropharynx (soft pallet, tonsils, and part of the tongue).

Fetal skull

So why is this so important? The structure of the primate palate means we can't breathe and eat at the same time, but we can coordinate breathing and swallowing to allow for eating. The pharynx is the shared route for both functions, but it's used differently for each activity. When breathing, the pharynx dilates to keep the airway open, but when swallowing, it constricts to push food down the oesophagus. When at rest, the epiglottis is upright and allows air to pass into the lungs, but when swallowing, the epiglottis folds backward to cover the larynx's entrance, preventing food and liquid from entering the lungs. Swallowing is therefore a complex process that involves coordinating more than 26 muscles and 6 nerves. When swallowing, breathing temporarily stops, and becomes more irregular and this can lead to problems, some of which I have had to face myself at times. As part of my own process of self awareness, I have to make sure I am calm and relaxed when eating, if not I can easily find myself with muscle tension in the throat, which leads to a difficulty in swallowing due to a globus sensation (a persistent but painless feeling of having something stuck in your throat when there is nothing there). that I can experience because of anxiety. The complex interconnection of interoceptual experience, (somatic feelings) and the autonomic nervous system that mediates unconscious activities, is hard for me to understand and yet I have begun to think that it is very important. So for myself, my own body map has one of its focal points around the throat, and since I have had problems with plantar fasciitis, another is the base of my left foot.

Trying to visualise plantar fasciitis

By owning some sort of visualisation of these sensations, I can help myself move on and not be stopped in my tracks by them, as I have literally been in the past. I.e. I can to some extent try to adjust my mental state in order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis'. (The process of keeping your body in balance by noticing changes and then acting upon them to regulate your systems). There are many ways to track your environment and spot any changes, some are very obvious, such as seeing something dangerous in the distance, or hearing a loud noise coming closer and then you can act appropriately, but an awareness of other more subtle changes can be more intuitive, and they may be 'felt' sensations, or beliefs, which are harder to pin down, but they are still perceived experiences. We have a wide range of equipment that extends our body's perceptual abilities, such as microphones, telescopes, microscopes and radar, all of which can be used to predict external changes, but as yet we have few mechanisms that can measure internal change and it is the complex arena of our inner lives that fascinates me and that I have been trying to visualise.

Anatomical diagram of the throat

Visualisation of interoceptual awareness of swallowing air

However, one of the most complex issues facing embodied awareness is the status of the other creatures that inhabit and make up what I think of as my body. As far back as 1991 Lynn Margulis had introduced the idea of the holobiont, a term used to describe a host organism and the microorganisms that live on or within it, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The holobiont body, is a body, like our own, where over 50% of the cells are microbial symbionts that are integrated into the physiological, anatomical, developmental, and immunological processes of the body. Therefore the actualisation of the body only occurs through the support of teams of species and in consequence an idea like 'immunity' can be thought of as a holobiont function, wherein microbes and zygote-derived cells cooperate for mutual defence. The zygote cell undergoes cleavage, or cell division and when it does, the new cells are called blastomeres, which are smaller cells that form a compact mass called the morula, which is the solid ball of cells that form the early stages of embryonic development in mammals. There is an elliptic visual connection here in that the word "morula" comes from the Latin word morus, which means mulberry, fruits that do indeed look very like the blastomeres and this year our mulberry tree has fruited abundantly for the first time. As Shakespeare knew, you don't pick mulberries as they will break up in your hands, you put sheets down under the tree and shake it, then collect all the fruits that have fallen.

Now humble as the ripest mulberry

That will not hold the handling.

                                        Coriolanus

Mulberry

A: The morula.  B: A cross section of a blastula

If we die, all the creatures that live on and within us die too or have to move elsewhere, just as if and when the Earth dies, all the creatures that live on and within it will die too. In order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis', an environment of co-habitation needs to be fostered, and this needs to be about mutual intra species processes of symbiosis, something that can be suggested by the processes of the visualisation of feelings, even if it cant be depicted from observation. The flow of movement that suggests the processes at work here is what the body cartography project is most interested in and it points out that the body is in its peak flow mode during the first few weeks of its life. Many of the signals that are sent out by an organising fetal entity are intra-species, a microbial life is being ushered in just as much as a mammalian one. The more we understand this, the less I would hope that we are bothered that some mammals are darker in skin tone than others.

The body cartography project uses dance as a form of embodied learning and communication. I posted recently on Katia Heitmann's work, whereby a dancer will observe others and then attempt to mimic their body movements as a form of archiving. The body cartography project is similar, in that a dancer wants 'to pay attention to and to move with things that are invisible yet also and therefore, invisible in the sense that you’re not seeing the same body structure and also invisible in the sense that things that are very patterned or repeated or are not very apparent sometimes, forgotten, like the sensation of wearing your clothes'...

Taken from a record of a conversation during the Fluid Spaces Event: Teknisk Museum, Oslo in 2022.

It seems to me that the dancer was searching for a way of communicating things that are on the edge of our awareness, in a similar way to how I am searching for a way of making myself and others aware of some sort of interconnected flow of energies, a flow that I could hopefully visualise in either drawing or ceramics.

From a developing animation

This way of thinking is not new, and if you have been reading my posts over the last few years, you will have seen that I am fascinated by the various theories that emerged during the 19th century as ways to explain what was going on in the world. The emergence around 1800 of the science of embryology was at the time a theory based on the epistemology of rhythm. At the time the concept of rhythm was crucial to many fields of knowledge, including the study of life and living processes. This led to an understanding of the living world in terms of rhythmic patterns, rhythmic movement and of course rhythmic representations, and it echoed Schlegel’s statement that, “All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.” The Romantic ideal was that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn’t be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone and this argument is something that I still have a great deal of faith in.

A link to more embryology images here

The illustration that describes the transition of a dot, as in drawing A, its extension and growth through to a recognisable form at point G, is as much poetry as science. At no point is a body ever either as it is represented at B or at G or at any other point, all the images above are figments of the imagination of an artist. 

B and G

Perhaps what I'm really interested in is the idea of 'becoming'. Becoming is a process that eludes observation and is hard to represent, which is why it is interesting to myself as an artist. Things that are directly analysable or measurable can reasonably easily be depicted, but there is a hard cognitive and perceptual struggle to be had, if we are to visualise processes that are continuous and often invisible and felt with senses other than the visual. This it seems to me is a worthwhile task, and it keeps driving me on to make the images I do and to believe that at some point these images might actually become useful.  

References:

Richards, R.J. (2010) The romantic conception of life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe. University of Chicago Press.

Wellmann, J. (2017) The form of becoming: embryology and the epistemology of rhythm, 1760–1830. Princeton University Press.

Wellmann, J. (2021). History of Embryology: Visualizations Through Series and Animation. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_22-1

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Katja Heitmann and embodied learning.

Eco awareness and OOO

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc's theory of iconography,

Benjamin Brett's idea of geometric psychology,

Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms,

Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright's Synchromism movement,

Edwin Babbitt's 'chromo-mentalism',

Katja Heitmann and Embodied Memory

Notebook page: The movement archivist trying to retrieve someone.

I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.    

For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.

I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.

The dancer sits in the style of a remembered person

I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being. 

I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.  

Notebook pages

I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality. 

The imagined interior begins to bleed into an external reality

See also:

On horizontality, the body and other things

Drawing and dance

Is drawing a language?

Drawing as translation

Documentation and drawing practices