The search for an image

Urinary tract infection

The image above was put together today and it arrived out of a complex series of decisions and experiences. The most pressing was an attempt by myself to respond to a very painful urinary tract infection before I began to lose my memories of what had been felt. One of the most startling aspects of having the infection was the sudden appearance of blood in my urine. I was needing to urinate while in a hospital waiting area, eventually finding a toilet and instead of getting the relief of urinary pressure, I was shocked by the sight of red blood against the white of the ceramic toilet. I had had and still have pain in my left testicle, although due to antibiotics kicking in this is much reduced. This is linked to pains in my lower back. But the worst conjunction of pain was a combination of constipation and ache caused by the infection, alongside a need to both urinate and defecate, neither of which I could do. I have been making drawings and trying to respond to my feelings about this, and have been attempting to find an image that is for myself a summation of what I felt, something that compresses several days pain and worry into itself. Eventually I found that I could bring together two previously existing images to create a new one, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed the surprise for myself of the conjunction of a red soaked form with a black and white one. I had been using linocut recently, for the first time for years, so that the language of lino was still something I was in touch with or feeling inside. This was an image made as a guide or study for a lino print and was constructed digitally, and working on a computer was more of a necessity because I was working from bed. I needed an image that at some point within it squeezed everything into a narrow channel, an image that felt as if it was too full, an image that was spiky with pain, but above all an image that was about the dangling nature of an in the mind, damaged testicle. So there you have it. I will at some point make a proper linocut of this, but that will be dependent on access to facilities. But is it a good image? In fact, what is a good image? Does it do the job? Can it communicate in such a way that it seems to make sense, without it being simply an illustration? What as an image does it bring to the table? What is the 'extra' it offers?

Edward Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. It stated, "Art is...the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world. That is what I am doing both when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves and/or when I'm trying to visualise how I see any other aspects of my experience. But not always, sometimes I think I work backwards or upside down. I'm an artist driven to look for images that for one reason or another hold attention and break through to people, even in a world already 'image soaked'. But what do I mean by this? Again I suppose I'll have to circle around the idea in order to begin to tease out some sort of understanding, as these things are never straight forward. Perhaps I'll begin with Barthes.
Roland Barthes in his 1980 book 'Camera Lucida', used the word 'punctum' to describe an unintended, sharp detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pierces, wounds, or deeply moves the viewer on a personal level. I was very taken by this when I first read it and have often misused the word 'punctum' as a way of asking myself and others why any image, not just a photograph, may stick in the mind, or become memorable in some way. Barthes uses the word to refer to a specific element that "jumps out" of an image and 'pricks' the spectator's conscience or emotion. This is for him something unplanned and unexpected, as it relies entirely on the viewer's private history, memories, and associations. For instance a small detail in a photograph may cause you to remember an incident from your past that was very meaningful to you, but perhaps would not be to anyone else. Barthes contrasted this to what he called the studium; the polite, educated understanding of what the photograph is about and what the photographer intended, the punctum in comparison being the disruptive element that breaks through our detachment and striking the viewer with visceral, emotional intensity.
This is one aspect of the search for an image that I'm interested in but it is just that, an aspect, for instance some images hold your attention because of a intellectually stimulating conjunction of image and idea, such as those produced by Mark Tansey, others are simply uncanny (das Unheimliche) having that unsettling psychological feeling, as when something simultaneously feels deeply familiar and strangely alien, such as Meret Oppenheim's 'Object', her fur covered tea cup from 1936, which even after all these years of being exhibited as a classic surreal object, is an image that sticks in the mind. 

Meret Oppenheim 'Object',

However I cant use the tropes of Surrealism any more because they are of a type, or what I would now call if using the term beyond the world of photography, the 'studium'; the educated understanding of what the image is about. Finding an 'image' is a hard thing, because it is doubly hard to surprise yourself, especially when you are like myself someone who has been in the art business for a long time, and have therefore seen a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it is easier to be a naive artist, or perhaps not, as people sort of expect naive artists to behave in certain ways, thus beginning for myself, to eliminate the unexpected before I've even seen the work. When I recently went to look through a magazine focused on outsider art, my first thought was that it all looked like 'outsider art', somehow outsiders had begun to know what they should be doing as outsiders. I want to be an insider who can at a chosen time turn inside out. 

That old idea of Goethe's that art is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, can of course be inverted, the reproduction of the world that is inside me by means of the world outside me, is a pretty good description of how I sometimes work when I'm trying to visualise interoceptual experiences. Again I'm looking for something that sticks or pricks that image of 'normality' or expectation. It's perhaps the opposite of 'like'. It is not 'nice'. An image is always 'uncomfortable' in some way. Therefore it has to have an element of surprise. 

In order for the unexpected to be be revealed you have to get lost. To get lost implies action. You are doing, and this is very important, you need to do stuff in order to makes things happen, but you also don't need to 'know' what you are doing. Jasper Johns said, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." This is good and a starting point, but it only gets you so far. You also need to be able to pull out of the process in order to notice when something has happened. Johns also said, "I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort." I think this is more like it, something is found "to hold a kind of energy", an energy that is created by some sort of active juxtaposition of the elements that make up the image. There being some sort of friction that as it rubs off against itself, it sparks some sort of energy into life. If you can hold on to this, stick it down in some way, without smoothing it out, without finishing it off, well, then you might have an image. 

I was talking to my old friend Steve Carrick about this not long ago and he recommended that I read 'Unknowing' by Rebecca Forman, a book by its very title I could see that it was touching on the subject, but as yet I've not been able to find it. Perhaps he gave me a false trail, but if he did, it did lead to a thought in my head as to what this book could be about. 

I have followed the work of the painter Adrian Ghenie for a while, and have found him a very good example of an image maker. He 'stalks' his images in various ways, sometimes needing to use collage to stir things up and give him glimpses of the unexpected, but he can also use traditional drawing. 

Adrian Ghenie: Detail

Adrian Ghenie: Mobile phone user

During the time of Covid19 like all of us he was isolated, so he drew and one thing he drew were people with mobile phones. He drew them over and over again, rubbing out, redrawing, looking for what they could be. Strangely as the drawings progressed the one constant, the mobile phone in a hand, became the least interesting thing, it was what was doing the listening that was interesting; the who it was who was interacting with the phone had become a discovery. I realised it was as if he heard a phone ringing, and even though it wasn't his, he picked it up and used it as a portal to find an image for a portrait drawing. You sometimes have to do stuff like that to catch an image off guard. 

Urinary tract infection

These are the first 7 drawings I made in response to how I felt about my urinary infection. They are on small A6 sheets of thick paper, again small so that I could do them from bed, this time sitting on it's edge, using a large A3 sketchbook as a table. As is often my want, I was using a dip in pen and ink to establish the idea.

I then followed that session with another using a brush and various coloured liquids, this time slowing down and concentrating on initially one image. 

Coloured image

This was too complicated but pointed to some thoughts about flowing liquids. 

Testicle weight

I went back to the earlier images and picked an idea out that suggested more testicle weight. I started to react to the horror I had when seeing blood in my urine. So I took another tack.

Ist step peeing blood

At this point I returned to using the computer and began processing in Photoshop. 

The first image that seemed to be on its way to being an image

The image immediately above was the first one to intrigue me, this was the last one to emerge directly out of the drawings done as an attempt to capture the feeling tone I had in my body/mind about the situation I was experiencing. I had been in a lot of pain, I was worried as to what it might all mean and the sight of blood in my urine had frightened me. 

I returned to some images working by hand and others I began to edit on the computer. At this point I'm not worried as to the authenticity of working on paper or computer, I'm simply searching for an image.

Pain and heat

For instance I might as in this case, go back directly to a hand made image, scan it and then look to see what happens if certain colours are changed. In this case the coloured image above, is adjusted so that the warm colours are brought out around the groin area. The warmth of pain is one aspect I'm trying to visualise. 

As I was now working on my computer, I had easy access to older images, and began to look through some of them, knowing that I had made some before that might work. What I didn't realise was that I had already made separate images of the final elements I would end up using, but by letting these first sets of drawings go where they needed to go, they had established in my mind an idea of what was needed. Their materiality had allowed a thought to jell and they had triggered memories of recent images. I eventually found one which was of work done to prepare for a linocut, (this seemed a better resolution of my stomach/body) and the other of a shape that was at one point a cutout that I inserted into a much larger image, The point being that it was of an extension, something that I was feeling the testicles were. Notice no penis, in the night the blood seemed to flow directly out of me. Drawings of interoceptual experiences are not to do with any sort of accurate anatomy. The resulting images are neither literal representations of the body, nor simply illustrations, they are materialisations of a process of encounter. I'm now going back to images made on paper.

Peeing blood

See also:

Hopper, Seurat and the study

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders

Mathematics, rightness and underlying beauty

Composition within landscape painting

The drawings of Henri Michaux 

From making votives to visualising Interoception

Image from a visualising interoception workshop

Stress influences the way we perceive pain. Our worry associated with pain, especially if the pain is long lasting, can make it worse. There is a feedback loop that will eventually lead to anxiety and depression and it is this feedback loop that I am hoping to break when I work with people who have experienced severe pain. 

Making votives alerted me to the fact that rituals and objects associated with them could be used to take away the pain or distress associated with a difficult experience. A votive materialises a thought, it congeals around a feeling and gives it literal weight. Once objectified, the votive releases the feeling from the person and can pass it on, become a holder for it or become a channel for the intervention of a higher power. The psychology of the situation involves the release of the trauma from the person who is suffering and 'takes their mind off it', as one of the people I was working with put it. 

Votive made for someone with chronic lung problems

Making votives led me to have to devise rituals for their use. However I didn't take that aspect of the work seriously, until by chance I met John Fox and Sue Gill, of Welfare State International and when John Fox saw what I was doing he wondered if I could extend the votive idea into rituals for funerals, something he and Sue Gill had been doing for some time. I was somewhat in awe of them, as I knew of the amazing work they had done over the years and was honoured to feel that John thought what I was doing interesting. Their 'Dead Good Guides' are designed to work in real situations and to show how art can be seamlessly integrated into the lives of everyone. I never did get to show him what I came up with, because he died not long after our meeting, but he had impelled me to move my work on and to really think about how and why my work should be more available and accessible to everyone, not just people from the art world. Not long after meeting John I had to attend a funeral of someone who had been cremated and it was obvious that people didn't really know what to do with the ashes. So my first venture into the territory was to think about rituals and associated objects, that might help people come to terms with the problem of how to dispose of someone's ashes.

Sketchbook page used to communicate the idea

Votives made to hold a body's ashes after cremation

The shell-like objects above are made very simply using pinched clay, which is then fired. Although I made these, the idea is that they should either be made well beforehand by someone before they die, or in response to a post funeral need, by a close relative or friend. Making small objects like these with your hands is an easy thing to do and the process solidifies imprints of every maker's fingertips into each object. Designed so that they can be easily pushed into the earth like a seed pod, they are closed with sealing wax or modelling wax to keep the ashes in. You can also make these seed or shell like shapes in the form of a necklace. One aspect of a pre-ritual workshop is to get the people involved to agree how these objects will be used. The more religious will perhaps want to use them like traditional votives, whereby a candle is lit and prayers said. If so these ash containers can be made into candle holders or have a wick inserted into their hollow insides. Mourners may want to add specific elements that remind them of the person who they wish to celebrate; before they release their relative or friend back into the earth or waters they came from. The more that people get involved the better. 

The ritual of letting go: Skimming votives off into the water

Ceramic votive in the form of a skimming stone filled with ash and sealed.

Another form these ritual objects can take, is that of skimming stones. Again made out of fired clay, two shallow concave forms are put together to make a 'skimming stone'. A hole is left in one side which allows ashes to be inserted and once that has been done, again wax is used to seal the hole, before the final ritual skimming of the ashes out into a lake, river or sea. 

From a sketchbook page used to communicate the idea

The work with votives always involves a drawing led conversation and that conversation leads to the visualisation of a desire or need. This is very emotional. The study of interoception grew out of this work and it has made me very aware that emotions are built within the body, that they are physiological responses to both interior and exterior change. When trying to visualise somatic awareness, I have begun gradually to build up a language of forms that have emerged from both workshops and one-to-one drawing conversations; conversations that are centred on the correspondent agreeing that it is possible to develop an image of their feelings, in a not too dissimilar way to how a police artist would sit with an observer of a crime and work with them to construct an identikit image of the perpetrator. Is it more like this...or like this...? The good thing about this approach is that the person involved doesn't need to know anything about art, they just need to make basic yes/no decisions. 

Which of these two drawings is more like the feeling you are trying to describe?

We often start with a simple comparison drawing such as the one above. Then rough drawings are made as the patient begins to open out about what they feel and we begin to sort out what is possible. 

Initial drawings done during a first meeting

Where is the feeling located?

Then we move on to where is it located in the body. Once I think I have enough information, I take the drawings back to the studio and then work them up. They are then scanned and turned into digital images and printed off. I bring these back to the hospital a week later and these images then become what is critiqued by the patient and ideas as to colour and its effect are developed. 

Annotated images developed with two different patients

As conversations move on I often get to visualise concepts such as how pain moves through the body. Typically this is described by participants as being like a zigzag of lightening. In the case of the image below I was asked to imagine a field of lightening that was also like a spider's web.

An idea worked up as a digital print

The final stages often require several changes, especially as colour is such an emotive aspect of visual language. At this stage images are digitally developed using Photoshop, which allows changes to be kept, because sometimes the patient wants me to take the image back to an earlier stage and it is so much easier to change colours. The digital version also allows me to print off copies for the patient to keep and they can be shown to other interested people.  

Image with annotations as reminders of the story behind it

The final image

Although I hadn't consciously tried to predict the visual shape of the final outcome, in several cases I realised that because we were dealing with the visualisation of normally hidden feelings, that this was not that dissimilar to visualising hidden energies. Patients would talk about the release of an electric charge within their body, or waves of emotion, descriptions that reminded me of the way that earlier researchers had described what they were discovering when they attempted to visualise invisible energies, such as the Odic force.*

In my own work, whereby I tried to visualise personal somatic experiences, such as a difficulty I had breathing due to covid19, I had also sensed that I needed to visualise a certain flow of energy, in this case how it was compacted and then released due to a blockage. 

The moment of a breath breaking into the lungs from a previously closed throat

My academic research has over the last few years looked into earlier attempts to visualise hidden or invisible forces. Initially I looked at visualisations that were the products of quasi-religious thinkers associated with Theosophy, partly because I knew that their work had influenced artists such as Kandinsky and Klee. However I gradually found more scientific thinkers and as I looked into their theories, I began to feel that there was a real need for a belief system that could explain why we feel as if there is something mystical about the universe. 

When researching older areas of esoteric thinking, that have now being debunked by science, such as geometrical psychology, Rayonism and other para-scientific theories, I began to see certain common beliefs, that might not have stood the test of time, but which do reflect an intuitive set of feelings that point to some sort of vibrational understanding of our reality. 

Visualisation of Chakras: From Leadbeater

The idea of chakras, the concept of body auras or the captured energy fields as seen in the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and the shapes of thought forms, are all attempts to visualise the invisible energies that flow through our bodies. Both colour and sound are vibrational energies and there are many examples of how sound can calm the soul and although the research surrounding colour theory is far less clear in terms of how effective colour can be in creating or changing mood, I have no doubt that colour's vibrational energy does effect emotional change. However after working with a wide range of people, I now realise that colour response is very personal and that it is not something that effects everyone's emotions in the same way.  But that doesn't mean I cant use it, in fact because it is so personal, it opens a door for idiosyncratic visual responses to deep inter-personal communication and one-to-one conversations, which is where most of my work is initiated. I don't though normally have to agree with someone else if my imagery is communicating. Outside of the work in the hospital, I am free to take the imagery wherever I feel it needs to go. The construction of meaningful to myself colour communications has become an essential aspect of my recent work and although colour is hard to pin down, so are emotions and the more I go on to work in this area, the more I feel that it is in the struggle to find an authentic colour voice for a feeling, that I will find a something that allows me to communicate whatever it is that I need to communicate. 

This image emerged from conversations about poor circulation in a leg

In my drawing conversations with people I often hear that they feel anxious, a state of mind that in Chinese culture is sometimes understood as a type of inner body chaos, or the blowing of 'internal winds' and sometimes their descriptions of the internal state of their bodies are less like a medical anatomy diagram and more like an immersion into a strange landscape or contact with alien energies. In Chinese medicine, our bodies are regarded as elements of and inseparable from, the natural world. We are an embodiment of the Earth and the Universe, the patterns of internal change that occur in our bodies, resonate with the external forms of landscape. All are manifestations of the universal Qi, the “substratum of the cosmos,” the essential quality of being, that I personally think of as another type of underlying vibration. 

An animation of an inner body form 

Each of these understandings allows me to develop imagery. By working with a range of overlapping viewpoints I can cross fertilise ideas and allow myself the luxury of imaginative play, whereby I 'freeform' with the visual elements that I have surrounded myself with in the studio and play with various interconnections as they reveal themselves.

The more I work with others, the better prepared I am to set up workshops designed to help people develop their personal interoceptual visual language. These workshops have often involved communicating the things learnt during my one-to-one drawing conversation sessions. I work with people in pairs, helping them to respond to each other's growing awareness of a chosen interoceptual feeling. People often chose a painful experience to try to visualise, but someone in a group will quickly realise that it could be a pleasurable feeling or a very different feeling, such as one that gives you goose bumps, that could be explored. I always encourage this as my research is about the benefits of a wider awareness of interoception than just pain. Craig, in his article 'How do you feel?', a paper that he went on to develop as an excellent book with the same title, points to an awareness of interoception being central to our feelings of being alive and that it is essential to our development of a subjective image of our sentient selves across time. He demonstrates how important interoceptual feelings are and shows how they are inseparable from the way the body knows itself and that emotions are inextricably linked to everything from muscle tone, to a need to go to the toilet. I'm writing this post from a hotel bedroom in Gothenburg in Sweden, having just spent the last three days at a conference devoted to the current medical understanding of issues related to spinal injuries. I sat and drew during several presentations and as the conference went on, I found myself coming to another visual conclusion about the inner body, one more to do with dendritic shaped fibrous growth at the scale of microscopic neurons. I think this was because I had been reading Craig's book and he looks at the evolutionary history of our nervous systems. He welds together ideas about both physical and mental feelings being transmitted to the brain; in such a way that I have an image in my mind of an emotive feeling being no different to a feeling of coldness, when it comes to an electrical signal, carried by neurons and stimulating the brain to make a decision about an action. I also began drawing mice and monkeys, perhaps to make sure I did not forget how grateful we should be to their contributions to spinal injury research. When I draw a monkey, it is a substitution for myself, an image that reminds me I am an animal also. I do realise that without the research that is done we would not be able to further our knowledge but I hope that when animals are used great care is taken to treat them with respect and to minimalise their discomfort and pain. 

Notebook page

In their book, 'Your Brain on Art', Magsamen and Ross use the term 'neuroarts', which is defined as 'the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behaviour.' When highlighting art's effect on pain awareness and how it can shape it, they state in relation to people interacting with an art form, (2025, p. 37), 'The physical pain may still exist, but how they emotionally relate to that pain has changed'. It is the visualisation of both a change in emotional relationship and an awareness that the physical nature of our insides is intertwined with these emotional changes, that I hope to continue to develop my art practice out of. It takes me into the unknown, which is where as an artist I need to be, but not only that it gives me an audience that perhaps for the first time begin to see that shapes and forms might actually carry information and communicate it in ways that they had never previously noticed. 

However I'm also still probing around at that old problem, of how in making an image do you represent a feeling of being alive? In German there is a term 'zitterbewegung', a sense of vibrating, oscillating energies, that is often associated with quantum mechanics, a term I quite like as it deals with things we cant see, but which need to happen if the things we can see are to behave in ways that result in the world appearing to be as it does. The hidden processes that go on inside our bodies are for myself similar, if they go wrong, the outward appearance of the external body is also changed, another tied together set of happenings. 

The making of an animation based on a feeling of the body as a landscape, is one approach I am taking to the visualisation of inner and outer somatic interrelationships, hoping that after watching it, someone might be able to put their own inner body feelings into action and thus begin their own journey to externalise feelings. As well as exploring how some existing interoceptual visualisations of inner body forms could be animated, I've been looking at Faraday wave phenomena, another aspect of vibrational energy depiction, that I've intuitively linked to a personal understanding of the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc. 

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc: Iconography obtained without light, electricity or photographic apparatus, due to the right hand of Dr. M. Adam

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and Dr. M. Adam, must have at one point in time conjoined to produce the image above. Their activities were I'm sure serious and purposeful and I would like to think that they felt that they had seen something special related to the invisible nature of our existence. They may even have found a way to visualise dark matter, not that it matters, what does matter for myself is the never ending journey of enquiry that as a species we continue to go on, each generation trying in its own way to find ways to visualise those things that we cant see, but which underpin everything that we do.   

The old lungs in action

Recent attempts to make images based on a feeling have been made in response to my own asthma. That harsh rasping feel of lungs struggling is one I know well, but to make an image of it is challenging. This time I have tried to think more about spatial aspects and have looked at stretch, perspective and our sense of vertigo when we are too high up and looking down. I never quite get it right, but each time I try something emerges and as it does it adds to the iconography of inner body speculation. 

• The Odic force was a hypothetical energy or life force, proposed in the 19th century by Baron Carl von Reichenbach. Named after the Norse god Odin, it was believed to be a pervasive energy that permeated all living things and could be influenced by other invisible forces such as magnetism, electricity and sunlight.

References

Craig, A. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nat Rev Neurosci 3, 655–666 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894

Craig, A. (2014) How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self London: Princeton University Press

Magsamen, S. and Ross, I. (2025) Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us Edinburgh: Canongate

Baraduc, H. (1913) The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible Paris: Librairie Internationale de la Pensée Nouvelle*

* In his book 'The Human Soul' Baraduc describes something he calls the 'fluidic invisible' or 'Odic liquid'.  We in effect swim in an invisible sea named by Baraduc, 'Somod'. The link above is hopefully still live and you will find images of his exposed photographic plates at the end of the book.

See also:

Drawing and healing traditions

Portrait as witness and control More on police forensic drawing

Macro and micro embodied networks

The iconography of the invisible

Body auras

Witnesses of the invisible

Measuring emotions and colour

Interoception: The research objective

The feeling of a lack of circulation in the foot

Over time I have slowly begun to realise that the embodied feelings that I have been trying to visualise are tightly woven into the emotions, thoughts and memories that are swilling around us as chemical seas. Everything seems to co-emerge as part of the raw feeling tone that is a conscious human being. These are the echo soundings of the physiological state of our body. If we are to achieve any sort of homeostasis, that state of balance that maintains our internal material, electrical and chemical conditions and reach an optimal state for the best way for us to function, we need to not only register how anxious or calm we are, but we need to reconcile various thought patterns, feelings and instincts, in such a way that we are in harmony with them. These feelings compose the soil out of which our actions will emerge and we need to maintain some type of harmony or balance, if this soil is to support ongoing healthy actions.

The congested chest 

If we can visualise the raw feeling states that we have but rarely turn our attention to, we can hopefully be able to get closer to an engagement with the complex meanings that emerge out of the embodied experience we have of our world.

The images and texts that I make from conversations with people about their feelings, are all signs of emerging narratives, ones that as they come out into the open, will help everyone to accept the confusion of existence and to come to terms with that feeling of not being quite ready to face reality, or sense of unease as they come to think about the 'what's next' of daily life. The strangeness of the forms that are worked with, is partly to get past the being 'too familiar with things' stage, as the forms often associated with feelings are too clichéd for us to actually respond to them honestly any more. 

A fear of incontinence 

I have just made available on line one of my working notebooks, whereby some of my images of embodied feelings are collected together.  These drawings were were made after having a series of conversations with others about their feelings. I made notes and then went away and developed a series of more 'worked through' images, whereby my own feelings were conjoined with the images I was trying to work with. I have been using this collection of images to help others and myself in the development of visualisations of inner or somatic feelings. The images can also be used to assess whether or not there is any close similarity with how others visualise their own feelings and if there is, perhaps a visual language of feeling representations could at some point be constructed. This is an old idea, but one that perhaps needs to be revisited. One of my aims is to eventually sit my work alongside that of long debunked theorists such as Benjamin Bett, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc and Walter Russell and perhaps do this with a nod to Jean Perdrizet's speculative engineering. This is not to disprove or prove any particular theory, but to flag up a common need to find an answer to why we experience the world in the way we do. Now I am older, I really think it is time for me to sort out how my own body/mind is wired up and I have turned to counselling to help myself to understand myself. Hopefully as I undertake the 'getting to become more aware of myself ' sessions, I also get to accept that whatever it is I am experiencing is mostly fascinating and wonderful. My present and past prediction mechanisms always seem to churn my stomach up and race my heart because they are set at a default of 'something terrible is going to happen'. This has caused me to often fail before I begin, or just not experience events as they could be, being overly nervous about what others might think or too worried about what might happen to actually let myself feel and experience what is going on around me. I have learnt over the years that if I am to make anything interesting as an artist, I have to embrace the unknown, I have to enjoy the fact that I don't know what will happen and that the more I am able to do this, the better the work will be. I now actually enjoy the process of being able to do this and it's time for this emotionally safe place to be the one whereby I site the rest of myself. 

Inner body, somatic awareness is concerned with sensations like feeling anxious or happy but can also be about feeling pain or its relief; all of these interoceptual experiences are as real as each other and they are entwined together. I have recently had to have a hernia operation, the process made me very aware of my groin and as I meditated on this I made images. Because I was confined to bed for a few days afterwards to allow the wound to heal, I was using my laptop computer to draw on top of and manipulate images that had previously been made using traditional drawing materials such as ink and watercolour. What emerged was a particular form that made use of a much more emotional colour range. Perhaps because I wasn't able to move far I needed to invest my emotional energies in colour thought. This is what emerged. 

A visualisation of sensations post hernia operation

As an observer you may or may not 'get it'. There may not be a shape or form that carries meaning in the way I would want it to, but that still doesn't stop me wanting to communicate that invisible something inside me. Perhaps all my work is simply a desire for others to see what is inside me, to be able to transparently communicate my thoughts to others. It is though in the interaction between others that meaning will emerge, just as it must have grown out of conversations around a fire at night in caves 40,000 years ago, a thought emerges into the open, either through spoken words, that may themselves have emerged from a mouthful of air, or from drawings made with a stick in the dust on the cave floor. 

Bunion pain

I'm sure many of us feel as if we are trapped inside our own mind and yearn to be able to experience and communicate with the world more directly and fully. To explore whether the visualisation of interoceptual experiences will help do this, is my research objective boiled down to its essence. 

That familiar anxiety starts up again

See also:

An annotated workbook designed to help others in the visualisation of interoceotual experiences. 

Breathing: An interoceptual experience

The visualisation of embodied feeling

Freud and drawing invisible forces

Benjamin Bett and Geometrical psychology 

Qualia

Drawing: Analogue and digital processes 

Visualising energy flow

Drawing together science and myth An introduction to the work of Jean Perdrizet

The diagram as art and spirit guide An introduction to the work of Walter Russell

The iconography of the invisible An introduction to the work of Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc