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Drawing the somatic body: Visual problem solving and imagineering [WORKSHOP]

Garry Barker, Leeds Arts University

The fact that human experience is subjective and as much an emotional reality as a logical one, is something that drawing takes in its stride. Constable’s cloud studies are as much scientific observation, as they are an understanding of the impact that the weather has on our emotions. Buckminster Fuller’s drawings of geodesic domes illustrate his architectural philosophy, as well as being plans for buildings.

Drawing can be at its most powerful when visualising the invisible. When words fail us, drawings can provide the space for ideas to become externalised and therefore available to communal perusal.

The research objective is to explore how our bodies become measuring sticks when we come to assess responses to perception, and it is based on an understanding that it is our interoceptive network that is used to enable prediction loops to work; a network that therefore is central to our ability to survive.

Our interoceptual network is linked to an invisible but intuitively well understood neurological map of the body, a map that is the ontological bedrock on which we build images; from diagrams of electrical circuits, to maps of war zones, via how to build it illustrations used to construct the latest purchase from a home furnishing store. However, people often regard photography as the only authentic depicter of reality, which is why when trying to convince people of the power of drawing to depict thought, it is useful to focus on things that we cant photograph. Drawings of invisible but clearly felt interoceptual experiences can not only be used to foster cross disciplinary imagination and invention, the emotional range that drawing also encompasses, allows us entry into a visual engagement with the emotive processes that underlie many of our embodied mind’s conceptual models.

This workshop uses a drawing led methodology that has emerged from attempts to visualise the interoception; it will ask participants to make their own drawn explorations of somatic feelings; drawings that will then be used as entry points into ways to understand drawing as a cross disciplinary practice. By using gestural mark and image making techniques, diagrams and mapping, this workshop will demonstrate that drawing is one of the most powerful forms of communication and that it can be used to make us more aware of the inner neurological maps of our own bodies. It will highlight how inner body mapping becomes the basis on which we build other drawn visualisations, as well as being the basis on which we build conceptually embodied concepts, such as the visualisation of justice.

Certain aspects of this work have already contributed to the i2ADS Drawing Across Disciplines seed project, ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing’ and associated workshop practices have been documented and written up as part of the forthcoming publication SKETCHING STEM: A Hands-On Guide on Drawing-to-Learn Approaches, for the Porto University led initiative, Drawing Across University Borders.

Keywords: interoception, somatics, embodiment, mind, drawing