Part of a vertical-transverse section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major.
I have recently discovered Camillo Golgi's Drawings of nervous systems. They are both beautiful and sublime. Golgi was faced with a difficult problem, how could he begin to see the cell structure within nervous tissue, as these cells were so tightly packed that if you tried to stain them in order to see them, you simply produced an un-analysable blob. No structural detail or lines of interconnection could be picked out. The axon and dendrites of neurons, the thin filamentary extensions of neural cells, were too thin to take up the stains that had been used in the past. However Golgi's method was to use a substance that would only stain a limited number of random cells. Using his method, dendrites, as well as the cell soma, are clearly stained for their entire length, which allowed him to visualise the complex networking structures of many parts of the brain. Interestingly it is silver nitrate, the key ingredient in early photography, that is central to this discovery. Because only random neurons were stained, it was much easier to see them, and then Golgi could speculate how they would collectively come together to determine their total structure. This reminded me of one of my first drawing classes at college on Wolverhampton, we were told to look at the situation with squinted eyes, and shown that in cutting down on the amount of light coming through to us, it was easier to see what we were looking at as details were eliminated.
Pes Hippocampi major
Part of a vertical section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major
In reality there would not be as much space around each nerve, but by giving each one its own space, a very convincing series of images were produced, images that allow us to 'see' what is going on, in our minds.
If you pull away from this microscopic view of the nervous system, as in the video 'Powers of ten', you begin to see the brain itself as an organ. Golgi's sections are located in specific areas of the body's brain landscape, just as a stand of trees might be located in a map of Yorkshire, that is itself to be found within a map of England.
Inferior and posterior cornua, viewed from above. (Pes. hipp. labeled at center top.)
From Grey's Anatomy
As the body organs are isolated from their position within a body, it is as if they become creatures in their own right, the poetic inhabitants of an ecosystem, that have at some point been captured and stuffed for scientific examination.
Corpus callosum
The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. It allows the two sides of the brain to communicate and coordinate signals. The 'O' on the drawing above indicates where the pes hippocampi lies; a location that when I saw it in the illustration above, made me think of a type of lure, its position within the drawing reminding me of the thaumatichthys, the trapjaw anglerfish, that has a bioluminescent lure located inside its mouth. This 'wonder fish' lives in the deepest parts of our oceans, inhabiting a dark so far away from the surface that if any creature was to signify the inhabitants of our deep subconscious, this would be it.
Illustration from the Ocean World
As we move in and out of the body, it is as if we are moving through a landscape with strange inhabitants. The organs and microscopic fibres illustrated above, are as much a product of an artist's imagination as they are a materialisation of a set of embodied functions and could, if we are not trained as medics, be anything and without labels, for myself they become 'free floating signifiers', things that suggest organic form, but whose functions I can only guess at; however their poetic function is what I'm more interested in, together with their possibilities for imaginative invention.
Please forgive my rambling mind, it is I know trying to get me somewhere, but as is often the case by a strange route. So do try to follow me as I attempt to make my next connection. In his paper on the biological bases out of which shamanism evolved, Winkelman (2004) argues that shamanism was the original neurotheology. Because, he argued, shamanism manifested itself all across the world, in many cultures and times, many of which could never have known each other; it was most likely that shamanic type thinking, has a biological foundation. He goes on to state that the brain has within it neurognostic structures, (the initial, inherited organisation of neural models from which more developed models grow) based on neural networks that shape basic forms of perception and that these structures also involve innate processing and representation modules that may underlie the reasons why we developed religion. He then goes on to state that animism uses innate representation modules that are deeply involved in how we understand our ideas of self and others, concluding with an idea that there is such as thing as a “natural history intelligence,” that uses an innate capacity 'for representing animal species to form metaphoric personal and social identities based in animals', (p. 210). But now we get to the nub of what I was interested in. After arguing that our bodies provide a neurological basis for human experience and knowing, he cites Newton 1996 and Friedrich 1991 in developing an idea that metaphors and analogic thinking, such as soul flight involve body image, therefore our symbol systems are derived from neurognostic models for organising both internal and external experiences (Citing Laughlin 1997). Sociocultural influences are still powerful shapers but he argues, 'universal body-based representational capacities combine memory, perception, affect, and cognition in an image-based symbolic information system'. (Winkelman 2004 p. 200)
Winkelman's paper made me think again about how my interests were perhaps more joined up that I had previously believed. I had been thinking of some sort of visual poetry, that could be developed that might link up my interests in animism and interoceptual representation. In particular sometimes shamans, such as those who operated within indigenous cultures of North America, used buffalo robes as part of their transformational rituals. Clothing yourself in the skin of another, being an excellent way to channel the other creature's spirit into yourself.
Shaman's buffalo robe
A body suit/ drawing made to explore the idea of an interoceptual self-portrait
In the image above, when it is activated by my presence, my head is positioned to peer through from the other side of the drawing, replacing the existing cardboard surrogate head, (top right). I stand where the two shoes are. Once I am in place, I deliver a monologue about the relationship between my emotional state and how I think about my body. Within the body suit/drawing are inserts and they are my responses to Camillo Golgi's drawings. I have no access to microscopes or other similar technology, so have to work with visual analogies instead. If you wet an area of paper with clear water and then dip an ink loaded brush into it to draw, you will immediately see a fine network of watery threads spread out from your drawn lines. These have become for myself part of my drawing's nervous system, visually operating like organs and as a conjoined nervous system at the same time.
An 'organ' detail from the drawing above
I'm working with two other artists on this aspect of my research and they will draw from the situation I set up in my studio, which will be made up of three or four situations similar to the one above. They will respond to what I have been doing, just as I will respond to what they have done, by making drawings. The drawings will operate as a form of communication between artists who are operating for at least a little while as shamans, whereby we see what can be passed on and what can be reinvented, in relation to the specific issues on the ground where each artist lives.
As Manvir Singh states in his book, 'Shamanism, The timeless religion', "We are all endowed with the same cognitive architecture,", (2025, p. 12), his argument being that shamanic practices reflect the way we are wired to think and that they reoccur in different guises over and over again throughout human history. The other day I was making coiled snail type creatures, based on an object I saw in a museum in Malta. They are designed to operate as votives for gardeners suffering an influx of slugs. We all need to believe that there is some way of making our wishes come true, one of these being that if only the slugs would go away, my garden would prosper. I tap into that wish and as I do I would like to think that I hold onto an invisible link that goes back thousands of years to those first artists who made images to intercede between the known and the unknown, a history that includes Camillo Golgi, as much as it does the "Sorcerer" from the cave of Les Trois-Frères.
Slug votive
References
Singh, M., (2018) Why is there shamanism? Developing the cultural evolutionary theory and addressing alternative accounts. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 2018;41:e92. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002230
Singh, M. (2025) Shamanism: The Timeless Religion London: Alan Lane
There was a large section of the biennale devoted to the portrait, and of all the various approaches the one that made most sense to me was the work of Dalton Paula. His Full-Body Portraits (2023-24) were from a series of sixteen paintings of historical figures of African descent who led, or were involved in, anti-slavery resistance movements in Brazil. It was however the way that he treated the painting of these images that impressed me. He had laid white grounds down for each painting and had left gaps in the paint where the white showed through as cracks or fissures in the image. A stylistic device that suggested that the gaps were metaphors for images of people whose very appearance was constructed upon a white western model. Each of the figures is dressed in western style, standing or sitting in some sort of relationship with western articles of furniture. They inhabit a western world that totally dominates the Brazilian society that these people existed in.
Dalton Paula: Sketchbook study
Dalton Paula
The work of Xiyadie, a father, farmer, gay man, migrant worker and artist, reminded me that the term 'artist' tends to single us out and that we are also fathers, mothers, factory workers, worried old men, happy young women, gardeners, walkers, mountain climbers, politicians, refuse collectors, cleaners and botanists. He cuts paper into visual narratives of his life, images that have documented his life as a queer man in China. For instance 'Sewn' (1999), describes his difficulty in accepting his sexuality while trapped in a heterosexual marriage. Pain and the helplessness of being trapped in a domestic setting are suggested by a huge needle piercing the roof of his house, while a large snake slithering inside him represents his desire. His images are allegories, but because they are made, by cutting out thin white paper and mounting it on black, then highlighting areas in a very limited palette, they seem very fragile, as if the life depicted could at any time fall apart.
Xiyadie: 'Sewn' 1999
Xiyadia: Detail
Xiyadia: Gate
Yuko Mohri wasthe artist representing Japan this year. Her work done by inserting wires into decaying fruit, 'Decomposition', was a demonstration of how you could generate sounds and light from a very natural process. When you insert wires into the fruit you in effect re-create the fruit as a battery. The juice in a lemon, acts as an electrolyte, while the wires act as the battery's terminals. When the wires are inserted into the fruit, chemical reactions occur that create an electric current. The fruits’ internal state is shifting constantly as it decays, which in turn is modulating the pitch of a sound or the intensity of a light. At the same time the fruit is emitting a sweet smell of decay, and its exterior is looking more and more withered or going brown. The fruit was presented on items of furniture that felt as if they had been found in a second hand shop, and old cabinets had been reconfigured to take lights or to now become speakers.
Yuko Mohri
My thoughts about art working as a battery and the idea of it working as a form of energy transmission were immediately triggered and I began rethinking some of my ideas related to sculptures using electrolysis. I had already done several drawings related to sculptures that also worked as electrolysis tanks, using metal coating from copper terminals via dilute aqueous solutions of copper sulphate and sulphuric acid. LEDs are so sensitive now that they only need a tiny amount of electricity to make them glow. I really do need to get back to some of my ideas and re-develop them, which is one of the reasons you go to these exhibitions, there is always going to be something that sparks off either a new idea or gets to to return to old ones refreshed.
In particular an artist from South America really did enthuse me to get back to my large complex drawing ideas. I have sort of avoided finishing some of these, not wanting to put in the effort, as it does involve a lot of concentration and physical control to cover large areas of paper. This is not just about sustained drawing invention but I also have to have enough formal control to enable some sort of visual coherence to be constructed. This has often in the past meant lots of adjustment and removal of initial invention, so that the various elements can fit together as a whole.
Santiago Yahuarcani is of the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia, which is at present thought of as part of Peru. His images collect together the memories told by his ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the continuing existence of nature spirits and Uitoto creation myths. For Yahuarcani both the landscape and its inhabitants are conscious, because he believes in an animist view of the world. The work is in effect a conversation with the artist and his surroundings, a conversation that is facilitated by the artist's mind inhabiting the plants, trees, and animals of the Amazon, as well as conjoining with creatures from spiritual worlds and other powers that emanate from the landscape he lives in.
Santiago Yahuarcani: Fight between yucca worm and grasshopper: 2022
Santiago Yahuarcani, Shiminbro, el Hacedor del sonido (2024
I went back to the Arsenale to look at Santiago Yahuarcani's work twice and if I had been in Venice for longer would have done so again and again. Each time I could see more visual ideas and the way he fitted it all together was terrific and so exciting. He had also used some ideas that I had come up with myself, such as fish slippers and he had no worries about using multiple and various scales in the same image. I of course looked him up on line and realised like myself he also made images about particular isolated narrative aspects of the mythos he was working with, such as his 'Fight between yucca worm and grasshopper', which again I emphasised with.
Santiago Yahuarcani: Details
The work of Santiago Yahuarcani re-energised me and reminded me that you can make work that is full of complicated detail and yet it can also be funny, exciting, inventive and in Yahuarcani's case colourful. Above all, looking back on the images I took when there, I'm very aware that instead of reflecting on the exhibitions visited this year, I ought to get on with my own work. I have a stained glass window to finish and have already returned to making large drawings that fit together to create a complex narrative about my own world and how strange that is.
My last post on the Venice Biennale ended with a reflection on presentation and possibly the most immediately arresting formal approach to this never ending issue was seen in the Romanian pavilion.
Șerban Savu: The Polyptych of Work and Leisure.
The wall had been extended in thickness, so that all his paintings could be inserted into shallow niches, making them sit flat, with their painted surfaces congruent with the grey painted plaster wall. 45 paintings of various sizes made between 2006 and 2024, were set out in a format that echoed those used in Christian churches and cathedrals. Indeed sometimes the images directly evoked that situation, as in the painting directly above, entitled 'Saint Christopher'. Serban Savu belongs to the Cluj school of Romanian artists, who focus on depicting the banality and uncertainty of life after the fall of Communism and whose work is characterised by a loose application of paint, often with dark, subdued palettes. This subdued tonal range reminded me of the Renaissance use of 'unione' techniques, by which you achieve emotional delicacy by tonal control. One way that controlled colour gradation can be achieved is by toning down colours by reducing their saturation, a method often used by Raphael.
Raphael: Saint Catherine of Alexandria
Raphael used this to achieve a certain monumentality of affect, suggesting that the Christian idea was a solid permanent thing and Savu by also restricting his palette suggests that work is somehow eternal. However as you get closer you become aware of the more impressionist application of paint and this begins to undermine the first impression. You then become more aware of the fact that Savu's paintings are populated by disorientated protagonists and lethargic extras, caught in the lull between work and rest and as you begin to grasp this, you realise his world is one where people are just as confused as we all are.The embedding of the canvases into the huge wall (2215 x 566 cm) and the formal layout, did though really impress me and it reminded me to spend more thought on presentation issues the next time I come to show work.
I have been aware of Madge Gill's work for many years, her drawings have a hallucinatory quality, checkerboard patterns tie her images of women into shallow spaces that suggest giddy, quasi-architectural constructions. Pale faces of nameless women, with ambiguous expressions people her images, crowds of them swirl about and push their way through a compositional thicket, which is in reality the organic shape of an energetic pen and ink drawing. When asked about her drawings she stated that she was working under the control of 'Myrninerest', her spirit guide, and that her drawings were some sort of magical outpouring similar to ghost writing.
Madge Gill
Gill's mediumistic communications from another world, proliferate in a dense web of repetitive mark making and the immense scale of the work presented at Venice, 'Crucifixion of the Soul' from 1936, is a monumental version of her characteristic approach. It reminded me of a stained glass window both in its luminous intricacy and the way it was made; she developed the composition by drawing on sections of her calico fabric as it was unrolled. I have not made any large drawings for a while, trying to focus on developing a wider range of imagery and looking for ways to open out the subject matter for my ceramic work, but this image reminded me that I need to finish the stained glass panel I have been working on and more importantly, that I have now developed sketchbooks full of imagery that needs to be activated by being brought together within both remembered and mythic landscapes as narratives. Some of my best work, (or what I regard as my most effective), has been done when I have set myself the task of creating large scale drawings that can hold within them complex narratives. They do though take a lot of mental as well as physical effort, but without that, the work can stay on a sort of 'OK' or satisfactory level, so I really do need to get back to making more ambitious images.
Outsider art, or art made outside of western art traditions, was central to this biennale's idea of 'Foreigners Everywhere'. Anna Zemánková’s images of invented plants and alien like organisms were another approach to what I think of as finding an internal affinity with an external reality. In her own words, she was “growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else”. The exhibition catalogue states that her 'forms seem to metastasise with a vital force of their own, laden with fruit-like appendages and delicate arabesques. The imagery of the pieces on display straddle both microcosmic and macroscopic orders, evoking a cartography of unknown astronomical formations as well as the reproductive structures of imagined plant life.' I couldn't put it better.
Anna Zemánková
Artists such as Madge Gill and Anna Zemánková who are considered as outsiders within a rationally focused western culture, can be seen, because of their mediumistic type communications, as being very similar to artists who in other cultures tap into the spiritual world, as a way to interpret the day to day realities of existence. Joseca Mokahesi, a Brazilian artist who lives in the Yanomami Indigenous lands. draws characters, scenes, and landscapes from his people’s universe, presenting myths and shamanistic chants, as well as moments from the everyday. Many of his characters are 'xapiri', spirits left by Omama, the Yanomami creation deity, to aid shamans in their tasks, who when summoned, descend and manifest in shamans’ bodies. The image directly below is of the spirit 'Hawahiri', drawn as a chestnut tree emerging from a mouth.
Joseca Mokahesi: A bee spirit
I could really empathise with this approach and have for a while been thinking that an animist way of thinking is essential to a reconciliation with a world that we have tended to mine for its resources, rather than find ways to communicate and commingle with it. Thinking about communication with things very different to ourselves might also mean that we need to see things differently and an artist/shaman such as Joseca Mokahesi, might help show us a way to do this.
Next to the space devoted to Joseca Mokahesi's images, was another Yanomami artist. André Taniki is a shaman who's artistic output is directly linked to his association with artist and photographer Claudia Andujar and anthropologist Bruce Albert. The drawings exhibited by Taniki were done in the late 1970s, and were made in conversation with Bruce Albert, when together they were searching for ways to depict shamanic visions. The structures of the drawings made represent the organisation of the cosmos from the point of view of the Yanomamis’ sense-universe. They are a sort of cartography which is visible only to the 'xapiri', the Yanomami shaman’s auxiliary spirits, and to the shamans themselves. The drawings, made using felt tip pens provided by Bruce Albert, made me think about the possibilities of translation and communication between different cultures and systems of knowledge.
André Taniki
This work also made me think about cultural tourism and what might be happening to these people once they had been exposed to the western art world. Nothing seems straightforward any more, but I hope both Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki found something of benefit by taking the time to put their shamanic visions on paper and using them to explain to others some aspects of the nature of their lives.
Naminapu Maymuru-White: paintings on bark
Naminapu Maymuru-White, presented a series of bark paintings that show animal and celestial motifs, and which were based on centuries-old stories. These images are meant to invoke old wisdom, connecting the earthly sphere with heaven and linking ancestors to people living now. The paintings are of the Milŋiyawuy an indigenous name for the Milky Way. It is also the name of a river that flows into the north of Blue Mud Bay, where Maymuru-White lives, and the paintings are also about the river. Their restricted palette gave these images a certain gravitas, and the themes of landscapes, stars and other elemental forms, still seemed to ring true, even if these images had been lifted out of the Australian territories that they were meant to be set within. I do understand that many of these indigenous artists have been locked into a western art world structure and that they have begun to rely on money coming from purchases made from outside their community, but even so, it seemed to me that some of the old magic of landscape embedded storylines was still there; these images were effecting me deeply enough to want to have one of them on my own walls at home.
Archie Moore 'Kith and kin'
The First Nations people of Australia have a considerable presence in this biennale, the Australia Pavilion itself showcasing a powerful piece made by the artist Archie Moore, who’s kith and kin is both evidence and a reminder of how these first inhabitants of the continent have been treated since the British occupation.A huge chalk on blackboard mural traces Archie Moore's Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations back 65,000+ years, therefore including the common ancestors of all humans. Handwritten across the walls and ceiling, this huge family tree engulfs the audience. As the catalogue states, the central black ink made pool 'works like a void; a memorial to First Nations deaths in state custody attended by piles of coroners’ reports. Archie adds archival records referencing kin to demonstrate how colonial laws and government policies have long been imposed upon First Nations peoples. These bureaucratic papers documenting tragedies are cradled by the reflection of the family tree in the surrounding water. The artist uses his family history to make systemic issues uncomfortably tangible to audiences while providing a prescient reminder that we are all kin.'
Archie Moore 'Kith and kin'
The video gives a much better idea of how immersive Archie Moore's work was.
I began to wonder if things had actually changed at all. Primitivism as an aesthetic was often used by Europeans borrowing from non-Western cultures. The Art historian Kobena Mercer when writing about Picasso'sDemoiselles d'Avignonin his book on black diasporic art, 'Travel and See',argued that Picasso's stylistic change in response to an African inspired aesthetic was individualistic and modern, but the artists he took ideas from received little to no recognition for their work. Picasso himself said about his painting "It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires." I think he intuitively as an artist recognised the magical intent of the work he was responding to, the issue being that the culture these works emerged from had no concept of the celebrated individual artist, the work emerging from a common cultural language of magical effect that many artists had used over long periods of time. If we can get beyond the idea of Picasso as a genius and simply see his work as a celebration of the human spirit, then we might be able to accept his appropriations as an acknowledgement of the inventive power of all human beings.
I'm still very much in awe of Picasso, he has taught me so much over the years and I still return to his work as a very deep reservoir of both formal invention and simple joyful, playful fun. So I will give him the final words for today's post. On entering the museum he found it damp and dusty and nearly left, but he didn't. He stated, "But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."
To be able to look at the work of artists from other cultures and see within that art something to inspire and change yourself, demonstrates great insight and empathy, qualities that many people have decided are not ones with which to associate Picasso. Like many Spanish men of his time he believed in the myth of the bull male, something that now seems totally unacceptable, but I don't believe he can be blamed for something his entire generation accepted as being the way things were.
