Wearable objects and Curative Things

In my first few posts of the new year I want to reflect on directions I am trying to establish for my forthcoming work. One of several strands I want to look at, is to explore various ways to miniaturise my ideas and I will try to use a variety of manufacturing techniques both commercial and hand made, to bring ideas to fruition. A while ago I looked at developing designs for tattoos, and I will hopefully be revisiting those ideas as well. 

 

Bracelet with votive images

I have written a chapter for the Palgrave studies in fashion and the body, for the book, 'Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine'. My chapter, 'Votives and Charm Bracelets: Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects', academically extends my research interest in votives and how objects help us to externalise our thoughts; the opening abstract hopefully explaining what I'm getting at. 

'The concept of a physical artefact acting as an intermediary between the embodied individual and the quasi-divine has historically taken many forms, including charms and tokens worn to ward off evil and ensure good spiritual and physical health. This chapter focuses on the artist Garry Barker’s practice whereby he aims to give material form to people’s psychological relationships with their bodies. Responding to themes that emerge from one-on-one conversations with project participants, Barker has used the making of votives and charms to articulate and materialise people’s health-related narratives. More recently he has been using the charm bracelet as a device for the presentation or exhibition of small sculptures and images that are designed as objects to help mediate between desires to transcend the problems of everyday reality and the need to seek wish fulfilment by channelling more spiritual forces.'

Making charms was an extension of my votive work. But the idea had a particular gestation. During the Covid Crisis I had been party to an argument about whether or not we should have the Covid vaccination. My belief, like that of most health professionals, was that if too many people avoided the vaccination, we would not be able to stop the endless rounds of re-infection. I thought at the time, if people could externally show that they had been inoculated, then more people would probably decide to make the same decision. So I made protective shield designs for necklaces and badges, as well as designs for charms and charm bracelets. The idea being that inoculation was a form of protection and that these items would operate as wearable protective charms, as well as a wordless way of communicating the fact that you had been vaccinated. 

Design for an 'I've had my Covid Inoculation' Necklace 

Charm bracelet idea

While I was designing ideas for the bracelet, I realised that my other ideas relating to various ways of visualising interoception could also be made into small charms. Pages of drawings in sketchbooks, soon became devoted to possible charms, and all sorts of forms began to emerge, many of them relating to past ideas that I had worked with. It seemed to me at the time that my entire approach to art making could be revised and instead to dreaming of grand gestures, everything could be miniaturised and people could wear these thoughts as tiny objects.

Notebook pages

I had an enamel badge made of the syringe on a blue shield image and it was distributed to various inoculation venues. Recently a local medical professional has donated one of these enamel badges and a collection of associated votive cards, that had used with people at the time of the pandemic, to the Leeds Thackray Medical Museum. The museum has developed a collection of objects that is designed to operate as a reminder of some of the things that were produced and used by the medical profession during the Covid emergency. It was good to hear that the badge had not just been used, but that it was felt it was also worth being archived.

The enamel badge being worn

In my various approaches to making things, I'm always fascinated by how a connection is made between what one makes and possible audiences. Interconnectedness it feels to me, will be more and more important to us all, as we struggle to come to terms with ourselves and the world that surrounds us. One of the greatest fears I have is that the vicissitudes of modern life will result in my isolation from both the world itself and other people. If we are not to make the planet totally inhospitable to our kind of life, we need to commune deeply with it. We need to connect with processes such as how its weather systems work, how soils support vegetation, how water flows, how air is formed and how animals survive and if that means that we have to return to older forms of communication and fuse them together with our more scientific understanding of how the world works, well so be it. We also need to develop a deeper understanding or awareness of ourselves. If we are to have empathy towards others, we need to be tolerant and to seek ways of communicating that don't simply echo the tight channel that we use for communicating with those people who are just like us. As we narrow the band width we become cut off from more and more people, as well as from other things, such as an awareness of why certain plants grow well in some places but not others, and of why some things thrive in certain situations but in others they fail. 

I had been trying out alternative ways to visualise ideas. The sensation that everything is connected also I thought, spreads out into how we envisage time. Breaking it down into past, present and future felt wrong; for instance South American pre-Columbian cultures, saw time as a spiralling interconnectedness and not a linear progression.

More abstract ideas such as this also need visual forms, and in response to this one, over pages of a small notebook, I found I was drawing spiral forms, over and over again. Forms that reminded me of ones I had looked at many times in the past. Spirals made by Robert Smithson and Louise Bourgeois, or by the people who designed the entrance to the Newgrange monument in Ireland. I had also been looking at badges made for pilgrims to wear. 

Pilgrim's Badge

As a test for how an idea could be visualised and then miniaturised I designed and had made a small enamel spiral badge, using the knowledge developed when designing and getting made the enamel badge for celebrating having being inoculated. These were distributed as gifts to anyone who wanted them. People liked the fact that when wearing one they would be asked, "What is your badge about?" and then they could begin a new conversation about what the idea of spiralling time meant to them. These are still available and I continue to give them out if people want one. The positive reception reinforced the idea that people's bodies could be like small art galleries and the more I looked around, the more I saw people using badge like forms to make statements about who they were and where they had been. 

From membership of a political party, via all sorts of other memberships, to tiny images used to elicit memories of visits to various places, badges are active participants in the communication business. 

Badge symbolising past, present and future, all experienced as one intermingled entity

Our bodies and their coverings can be like materials out of which we construct images of how we wish to be seen by others, We communicate using our eyes and noses just as much as we communicate using sounds. Tattoos, clothes, jewellery, hair, deportment, skin condition, perfumes and the general demeanour or feeling tone of our physical presence, make for direct communication channels with others. The article I wrote is a more 'academic' attempt to try and communicate how these processes might work. It suggests or points towards ways of making artworks that fit into the mainstream of life, rather than them operating outside of our day-to-day activities. It also implies a critique of a 'special' art world, where the value of art is measured in terms of money and status, as well as the prestige of the institution showing the work, rather than in terms of how well artworks can help us to connect with each other. 

I would like my work to operate as a doorway into ways of thinking that begin to forge connections between between people and ideas, as well as between ideas and ways of relating with the rest of the world. I have always thought that the more you have empathy for others, the more chance there is of eventually finding those others can become either friends or helpers in the difficult negotiation of life's vicissitudes. But empathy seems in short supply at the moment; if the making of art can do anything, perhaps it might help with the building of empathetic connections. If only the wish of a more altruistic world could come true, simply by wishing it. In the meantime, I will continue to make things that help me to externalise or crystallise my thoughts and hopefully as I do, others might also find these solidified thoughts useful. 

Material tests

Charm idea developed from the material tests

Bracelet charm idea

These ideas for bracelet charms were developed using images emerging from an awareness of somatic experiences. I sat with people and developed conversations about their inner feelings. These might be about their psychic state, or their physical condition, but most importantly they were attempts to make visual images of sensations that were normally invisible. Lots of drawings were made as well as small sculptures using clay. Gradually communication developed as images emerged. At the core of each conversation, as a form developed, was the question, "Is it more like this than that?" 

The tiny low relief sculptures that were made as additions to charm bracelets, were meant to operate in the same way as my previous votive images. They were objects that had been made from externalised feelings in this case, rather than representations of things such as arms, legs knees or necks. The bracelet that contains images of votives that sits at the top of this post, was the first version to emerge of this idea; it was a way of furthering my older concept of how to work with votives. The later more subjective interpretations were harder to develop and also much more difficult for other people to interpret, but following the experience of the spiral badge, it is hoped that people will wear them, and take pride in opening out their own interpretation of what these tiny objects could signify. More importantly, could they still operate as charms? Could they field off illness or psychic attack? Belief is a strange thing and it is well known that the placebo effect is real. 

Whether or not I manage to further these ideas will depend on how they unfold. Best laid plans etc. I have been sidelined by various things recently and have decided that by having a variety of projects on the go, at least some of them may prove fruitful; hence this new year resolution. 

See also:

Animism

Drawing and communication theory

Mythic Worlds

'Votives and Charm Bracelets: Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects'

An article on my votive making

The spiral

The tattoo

B. W. Betts and Geometrical Psychology

A B. W. Betts drawing of the shape of consciousness

Back in 1887 B. W. Betts published his thoughts on geometrical psychology. This early text on psychological thought forms is still available and you can get access to a copy of it here. 

B. W. Betts geometrical analysis of the shape of consciousness 

I have been looking back on a few of these 'oddball' publications, such as 'Thought Forms by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater or Walter Russell's diagrams of mystical energy forces, and rethinking what they might be about. At the time they were often associated with Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky's attempts to uncover the underlying spiritual and metaphysical aspects of reality, but I have been exploring a different idea about thought forms, one that I think still has relevance. 

I have also been exploring ways to visualise 'interoception', those thoughts and feelings we have that emerge from inside our bodies rather than from exterior perception. But in order to do this I have had to rethink how I contextualise the body. 

 From a series of images exploring how inner body feelings can be visualised

The exterior of the body is a surface contiguous with its interior. If we think about the body as a topological entity, one with a continuous surface that is in effect 'folded' as Deleuze would put it, we can imagine it both interacting with exterior perceptions, and producing its own interior perceptions at the same time, both types of perceptual experiences influencing our intuitive awareness of the shape of thought forms. Deleuze in reference to what he calls 'le pli' (the fold) argued that the world can be interpreted as a body; a body that is made of continuous folds and twisting surfaces that weave in and out of spacetime. The idea of 'le pli' for Deleuze, referring both to a twist of fabric and to the origins of life, rather like a twisted strand of DNA. The contiguous nature of the body's topology means that in effect there is no 'real' interiority to the body, only a sliding into and out of darkness, such as that experienced as you go down a long tunnel, or make a descent into a cave during the full light of day. Because no light penetrates into our interior we tend to think of it as a separate space, but it is not, it is though much more viscous, wet and sticky, in the same way that a swamp has no hard boundary with a dry flood plain, they can both be encountered on the same journey. In this case what I'm imagining is a journey of exploration into the role of perception as a constructional force that shapes our consciousness. 

The initial diagrams also explore an idea of a surrounding membrane though which passes information that eventually passes into the body, be this sound, food, a story told to me, a touch or a smell. The shape of the inner feeling form being a hybrid of both visual memory and synesthetic play. 

Diagrams of introception

The more diagrammatic representations came first, and the textured and coloured images afterwards, and in between arrived the workshop images whereby people responded to my initial visual thoughts with their own.

Bunion pain

Dizzyness 

The more textural responses from others, (in this case Lynette W.), led me to think more about the fact that it is textural detail that gives emotive power to images. (See my earlier posts on texture)

Gradually the various things I'm thinking about begin to make some sort of sense if only to myself.

See also: 

Perceptual research

Drawing textures

Surface and inner body perception

Qualia

Hybridity and permeability

The dotted or dashed line

Eye music

Qualia

A representation of initial stirrings of sexual attraction

So why a post on qualia? I'm undertaking some research at the moment into perception, in particular into how we can represent perceptions that emanate from our inner body, what are sometimes called somatic sensations or interoception.  Qualia are defined as the phenomenal qualities of experiences. These are the raw felt qualities of sensations, emotions and thoughts.  They are experienced privately, subjectively, and directly; in fact what you might call consciousness, I would argue, is what they collectively combine to construct. 

The notion of 'qualia' is of central interest to anyone involved in making drawings about perception and trying to theorise about them. As a technical term it sits within a sub-set of language developed to deal with philosophical concepts. In this case phenomenology. 

I'm fascinated in the use of this word, perhaps because I'm very suspicious of words in the first place. I tend to think that in their very definitions they cut us away from the actual experiences we have. For instance, the word apple in no way helps me to explain the relationship I have with the experience of it. Of course most people would argue that it is in using the syntax of language and the sentences it helps us construct, to explain the particular experience I had with the apple, that words come into their own as a way to help us communicate to each other. But what I would argue, is that because each language is media specific and what it communicates is mainly something about that specific language, we have a problem. In this case we have a language made up of words; therefore the word, 'qualia' goes right to the heart of the problem. 'Qualia' is the plural of 'quale', which means that within this sub-set of language an assumption is already in place that the sensations that form experiences come packaged together as bundles, rather than as individually identifiable components. But in order to understand 'qualia' as particular types of sensations, we have to remember that these bundles of experiential data are based on 'a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person', or, 'individual instances of subjective conscious experience'. Once again words tend to be problematic, because this is a process, not a set of things. In the middle of this I would though like to throw in a question as to whether or not 'qualia' are only experienced by humans? The word is derived from the Latin neuter plural form 'qualia' of the Latin adjective 'quālis' meaning 'of what sort' or 'of what kind' but always in specific instances, such as "the sensation of what it is like to taste this particular apple now". The word tending to put a focus on the human experience of sensations rather than the quality of the sensations themselves. Many will argue that you cant separate the two but the fact that words allow you to do this, in some ways flags up the problem with words as experiential atomisers. 

Qualia are the alternatives to 'propositional attitudes' or beliefs about experience, they are concerned with what it is directly like to be experiencing. 
Qualia, and those feelings and experiences we have of them, come in all sorts of formats, and these depend on the way our body works. We have looked for example at how we use a mobile phone in relation to the various uses of our touch sensors.  Qualia can also be the sensations of colour perception or a feeling, such as sorrow or anger; a mental state can itself provide qualia, as can a feeling of hunger or pain. I am in each case experiencing a phenomena that I 'know' or 'sense' in some way as being unique. It feels like this rather than that and is an introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspect of what some people would argue is my mental life, but which I am beginning to think might not be just to do with me, but to do with the entanglement of myself into the wider world. 

The status of qualia are hotly debated in philosophy largely because they are central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem and because of this, I have decided to try and build a series of representations that will allow me to both externalise my thinking about them and to begin a process of communication with others as to the possibility of qualia to operate as representational hinges for those sensations that operate between reality and its perception and in particular the perception of the interior life of our own bodies. 

If qualia are the representational contents of experiences, image making is the closest we can get as human beings to a process that parallels those processes at the core of experience itself. 

That feeling you have when you experience hunger without actually being hungry

The elements that I am using to represent qualia are those very basic forms that I have been drawn to as underpinning the majority of our visual representations, those forms that are generated by the activity of the brain and its relationship with the perceiving body. These are the formal elements that make up what are often called 'entoptic' phenomena, a table of which I am beginning to use as a generator for a drawing language that is being constructed in order to represent feelings and the way they are held within a body in space. 

Some basic entoptic forms

I have made quite a few drawings using these forms and have been looking at how as a language, their relationships can be learnt as a sort of code that stands for various somatic feelings. Even though this is a project in its early stage, it feels to me as if it has many possibilities in the opening out of an approach to finding a language to talk about feelings, such as pain, itchiness, loneliness, hunger, the need to go to the toilet or to indicate indigestion or a heart beating too quickly.  

Subjective Visual Phenomena – Johann Purkinje

Entoptic images are caused by phenomena within the observer's own body, therefore the observer cannot share a direct and specific view of the experience of the phenomenon with others. Because it is impossible for two observers to share these experiences, these phenomena have to be regarded as 'subjective', their status hard to verify, but we are aware collectively that feelings of pain or loss, are experienced by others. This central issue, the problem that exists in relation to 'objective' definable reality and the fact that the only experience we have is subjective, suggests to me that these entoptic forms are an ideal starting point when attempting to develop a language to communicate subjective feelings and inner body experiences. 

Heinrich Klüver’s Form Constants

Heinrich Klüver extrapolated four groups of entoptic visual phenomena that he called 'Form Constants'; these were, lattices, cobwebs, tunnels, and spirals. More recently it has been theorised that structures of neural interconnectivity could dictate the type of emergent phenomena that can be produced. Neural network models of geometric hallucinations have gradually incorporated  empirical insights from neural anatomy and physiology, including the spatial arrangement of different neuronal cell types.

It has been argued that the worldwide prevalence of certain types of geometric visual patterns found in prehistoric art can be best explained by humanity’s shared neurobiological embodiment. This area of investigation covers the complex relationships between symbolic material culture, first-person experience, and neurobiology; an area of research focused on the interrelated concepts of sense-making, value, and sensorimotor decoupling that has in particular been investigated in the work of Froese, Woodward and Takashi. What I'm particularly interested in is the development of a series of images using computer software such as PhotoShop and Illustrator to clarify and develop my own hand drawn images, in such as way that basic formal elements or 'form constants' are used to carry information that would have been familiar to human experiences from over 40,000 years ago and which may have been communicable at the time and which may become so again but within an entirely new context. 

Froese, Tom., Woodward, Alexander. and Ikegami, Takashi., (2013) Turing instabilities in biology, culture, and consciousness? On the enactive origins of symbolic material culture  The Journal of Adaptive Behaviour 21(3) 199–214

See also:

Part two in a series of posts related to perception

Texture perception

Hybridity and permeability

Somatic images 

The spiral

The zig-zag

The hashtag

Dots and spots

The dashed or dotted line

The cross