For someone trying to visualise interoception, this phrase has often come to haunt me. Interoception is defined as the sense that allows us to perceive internal bodily sensations, such as emotional change, heart rate, respiration, hunger, and pain. It's often described as the body's "eighth sense," playing a crucial role in our moment-to-moment awareness of our physical state and influencing our emotions, self-regulation, and decision-making. Chen et al (2021) point out that definitions of interoception change and that they were initially to do with a creature's 'internal state', then by the mid 20th century it had become a way of referring to the dynamics of a body's homeostasis and only recently has it been seen as a communication process by which the nervous system both senses and integrates information about the inner state of the body. They highlight 'the complex interplay between the brain and other organs necessary to monitor and regulate internal states'. (Ibid p. 4)
The anatomical boundary that separates interoceptive from exteroceptive experiences has historically used the skin as a dividing border. Chen et al (2021) point out that interoception was focused on signals generated from within the body, sensations occurring below the skin, but as I have already become aware, it's not quite as simple as this, there being no clear division between internal and external realities. Even so, I like to feel that the images I make can 'get under your skin'.
Perhaps this is why that old Coptic text of St Thomas still strikes a chord in me.
Although most of the current texts on introception rely on discoveries in neurology, as an artist, I'm still fascinated by psychology and its early acceptance of a subconscious/conscious dialogue. In fact the inner/outer duality of interoception/exteroception, stirs within me Surrealist yearnings and I'm prone to make responses to what I think I might be feeling, by relying more on instinct and chance than any sort of rational process.
The psychology of interoception works with body awareness and an ability or inability to use this awareness, can affect psychological issues related to mood and other emotional factors. The work I do in trying to help raise awareness of somatic feelings will hopefully help others enhance their ability to control emotional regulation and well-being, but I don't expect my art as such to change anything. The process of being involved and listening is probably the most important issue in relation to the fostering of wellbeing, the artworks themselves are stand alone entities, that emerge from a fusion of the process of listening and the process of image development. Part of the process therefore of an image's development, may well be therapeutic, but the final images are creatures in their own right, things that can carry whatever meanings they can, but they are not in themselves therapeutic images.
I have been working with other artists to try and resolve some of these issues, as well as people who are not at all connected with the art world. Sometimes because of the close affinity I can feel with fellow practitioners, especially those that see drawing as fundamental to their practice, I can begin to see an almost epic dimension to the work. In conjunction with two artists that I have known for several years, I have recently been making much larger drawings, these are attempts to capture some of the essence of another person's life experience. We have spent some time preparing for the sessions, each artist making objects or drawings that can be shown alongside themselves, things that are used to animate the situation that we each draw from. The difficulty is we are all isolated from each other and we use the medium of the computer screen to communicate. We have though been doing this for a while now and we have tried a variety of ways to break through the barrier of the screen and try to 'touch' each other with our 'inner' as much as our 'outer' appearances. Above all we talk when it is our turn to be the subject. Conversation is such a wonderful thing, our sometimes awkward and at other times poetic attempt to put into words the things we are thinking and feeling, is right at the centre of what it is to be human. This alongside an eternal hope and expectation, that others will get some sort of awareness about our inner thoughts from a dialogic process. When you do this with people who are also practiced at another form of conversation, that of direct drawing from experience, the conversation is deepened. You are in the company of those that can feel the limitations of verbal conversation; as artists they of course value the poetry of communication, but they also, like myself, sense that so many things are unsaid, mainly because they can't be 'said' using words. We look at ourselves in the mirror and see a something that is as much the person inside as outside, our outward appearance a cypher that has to be decoded in order to engage with inner thought. A stance may indicate illness, mental state or environmental threat, the speed of a body's movement tells us so much about the physical and mental state that it encloses, the smoothness or erratic track of someone's hand gestures speaks silent volumes.
Portrait of an Italian artist by an English artist: The inner and outer of an interoceputual experience
The three of us have recently been working on a particular project, focused on trying to extend previous ways of making portraits of each other and on my part, I have also been trying to re-define for myself what it is to make a portrait of another human being. This overlaps with the work I have been doing in the hospital, but in the protective bubble of artists communicating with other artists, I feel that I can begin to let go of my normal reserve and reveal aspects of myself that don't normally emerge in everyday life. I sense that that is also the case with my fellow artists. Perhaps this is art as a form of counselling, I don't know, but I do know that emotionally this is a very hard body of work to be engaged in and that it really stretches my ability to make emotionally resonant images.
Portrait of an English artist by an English artist: The inner and outer of an interoceputual experience
As I make the drawings, which are 5 feet (h) x 8 feet (w), I also photograph them and then make prints from the drawings, which are what I'm putting up for you to see on this blog. The prints are more screen friendly, I don't think the translation of large drawings into screen images works at all. The scale of the originals is such that you need to step up to them and then pull away, in order to get a sense of how they work. I'm also making all of the work done from the hospital available in digital print form, so that it is available to everyone concerned, patients and medical staff, and therefore I am becoming more attuned to the relative values of digital versus analogue imagery, seeing them both as capable of carrying feelings and emotional registers, but in very different ways.
An important issue is surface. The hand drawn initial images clearly show the traces of material changes and human interactions. There will be now dry water diluted coloured liquids, pen marks cut into the paper, areas of wiped away colour still holding a memory of the wiping in their stain, frozen brush strokes and fingerprints from when I have had to support myself as I have leaned over the drawing in order to make marks. The hand is remembered because the scale is one to one with the body, the paper size forming a flat theatre of possible re-enactment of every gesture made in the image's making. The digital version is very different, but as a print it carries a set of values compressed into a form that is equally powerful as a communicating surface. Paper and ink are fused together in a different way and if the right paper is chosen, (in this case Hahnemühle German Etching mould made paper and the inks all at maximum intensity, i.e. the printer is properly working and laying down colour as dictated by the digital colour files), the surface can be rich and seductive. Differences in handling in the original are now translated as changes in granular texture. The thickening and thinning of paint or ink as it moves across a surface can be captured by photography and tonal differences enhanced by using a digital filter that operates in the same way as now long discontinued lith film*. As this filter has only has black or white options it will produce a black and white granular texture as a translation of a smooth movement between light and dark. Therefore a brushstroke may now have a more three dimensional appearance or a new texture, due to the 'pushing' of the contrast.
This way of working is a hangover from my time as a print technician. When I used to make silkscreen prints, I would often use what we called at that time, black and white 'lith' film', which came in rolls, so that it was large enough to make A1 size photographic exposures. Once made these positives of developed film were in effect 'burnt' by light into an emulsion that had been applied to the surface of the nylon screen, thus making a negative, through which ink would be squeegeed to make the positive on the paper that was to be printed on. High-contrast lithographic film was a specialised type of orthochromatic film designed for graphic arts to produce stark black-and-white images with maximum density and stark separation between tones, using a process that required careful control of developer strength. The film was specially produced for silkscreen printing, as any stencils; photographic, painted on or hand cut, had to allow for the printing of flat colours by pushing ink through a fine nylon screen. As technology moves on, it often carries memories of a previous technology embedded within it. For instance the first cars were at one point known as horseless carriages and their box like shape was a reflection of this. In a similar way the early filters designed for Photoshop, tended to reflect the types of photographic film and associated processes that existed before digital processing.
I'll try and explain how I use this in the development of a digital print. In the detail taken from a hand made original below you can see the thickening and thinning of paint and inks, as well as tonal diversity.
Detail of a large drawing
Image converted to black and white and using the 'stamp' filter in Photoshop
I can selectively highlight any area and make each selected component of the image darker or lighter, so may make four or five different black and white exposures and then collage them together to make a final textural layer.
Once I have a surface similar to the one above, I can use this as a layer that can then be placed on top of coloured layers, often as in silkscreen printing, making the layers transparent, so that colours can both intensify each other and create often unexpected new colours as they overlay. I can then build the image up, layer on layer and as I do I can push some elements into the background, heighten others and remove anything that doesn't support the overall emotional tone.
Detail of print
As you can see the final image made for print, is very different in surface feel to the original drawing. All the layers are compressed down before printing, their colour intensity when translated into ink, giving the image an impact that for myself, can be as powerful as the one made by the size and textual surface of the original drawing. Deciding dpi and output size is also of vital importance to the look of the final image. When printing these images, they are in effect squeezed out onto the paper surface and as they emerge back into daylight, this very compaction gives them a certain traction that allows them to stand up alongside images made in more traditional ways.
I have digressed I know into technical matters, but they are all a necessary part of the process of drawing out the interoceptual aspects of an experience. Technology is a vital aspect of drawing, a word that has ancient connections with the word 'drag', in the sense that you can drag a plow through the ground, thus scoring it, leaving a line of exposure as the earth is turned over to reveal the colour of the soil below. I am in effect trying to use drawing to drag out of myself and others, some sort of response to the feeling tone of interpersonal communication and whether this requires analogue or digital processes to do this, doesn't I feel matter, what does matter is whether or not some form of communication is made.
Finally some thoughts about the drawing out from within that touch more upon the poetry of that inner/outer flow. In Philip K Dick's science fiction novel 'The Divine Invasion' he develops a wonderful description of what space and time is like for God like beings and I transcribed his description of a particular journey taken by one of God's prophets into my own words, in order to get some sort of traction on the poetic possibilities of a mind seeing both inside its own body and at the same time being able to escape the confines of a body and move out into the cosmos. This is what I wrote at the time when I attempted to imagine myself as one of Dick's characters:
My mind began to travel in an outside mode, my consciousness ceasing to be something, instead becoming a process, evolving into accretional layers, inhabiting a timescale of the outer world. From there or when, they are now both of one indivisible form, I could at last see the inside forms of my somatic body from another reality and as I rose above myself, I became a process of Hermetic transformation. I saw my body not as a mass but as transparent pictures permutating at an immense velocity, images made of forms outside of space, being fed into the body to become reality. As this image froze, time ceased. Slowly, by degrees a transformation began to take place, I saw outside of myself a pattern, the print of my own brain, I was within a world made up of my brain, with living information carried here and there like little rivers of shining red that were alive. I could reach out and touch my own thoughts in their original nature, before they became thoughts. Space filled with their fire, it stretched out, the volume of my own brain becoming external to myself.
I now began to introject the outer world, so that it became contained within myself. Now having the universe inside me and my brain outside everywhere. My brain extended into vast spaces, far larger than the universe and I knew the extent of all things that were myself and because I had now incorporated this world I knew it and controlled it.
What is within you, is also outside you; what you bring forth will both make you and disguise you.
References
Chen, W. G., Schloesser, D., Arensdorf, A. M., Simmons, J. M., Cui, C., Valentino, R., Gnadt, J. W., Nielsen, L., Hillaire-Clarke, C. S., Spruance, V., Horowitz, T. S., Vallejo, Y. F., & Langevin, H. M. (2021). The Emerging Science of Interoception: Sensing, Integrating, Interpreting, and Regulating Signals within the Self. Trends in neurosciences, 44(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2020.10.007
Dick, P. K. (1981, 2008) The Divine Invasion London: HarperCollins
