Drawing : Figure-Ground Relationships
Lung / tree
This works both ways and when drawing a landscape you can suggest it is alive and breathing by the way you place and shape trees.
Tree lungs within a landscape (detail)
Entrusted with carnival business: Pen and ink wash: 112 x 50 in
In my drawing, ‘Entrusted with carnival business’, I wanted to show that a local park was in effect the ‘lungs’ of the area. In the ‘Mythic landscape’ drawing, there was an attempt to fuse together the concept of our emergence from a female principle, that was both a body and a landscape.
Mythic landscape: Charcoal on paper: 16 x 23 in
Embodied landscape: Pen and ink, watercolour and ceramic: 72 x 60 in
The embodied landscape drawing above was an attempt to fuse landscape, body and memory together. The landscape that flows from the embodied hills being one reconstructed from memory, as was the ceramic octopus, which was a reconstruction of a child’s toy, something that was important to myself when I lived in that landscape when I was growing up. Memories inhabit the body, just places are engraved into old maps and that feeling of inhabiting a body, never leaves us until of course we die.
The flow between an external view of a body and how we see a landscape is something I have tried to depict several times. Some embodied feelings are not so straight forward, but their images can be designed to still use a certain amount of ‘bistable perception’, just enough to make the observer have to use a little more energy to try to ‘see’ what is there and as they do perhaps to ‘inhabit’ the image on their own terms.
Embodied feeling of a failing knee: Felt tip, watercolour and ink: 11 x 16 in
The image of a knee above was made after talking to an old school friend, who like myself is now retired and his knees were going. I made several images of our conversations and he has since had his knees replaced, but the whole experience in effect gave him a mountain to climb. For a while each knee became for him the centre of his perceptual world, the pain blotting out the rest of the landscape.
A drawing from a series of images about tinnitus
A working image exploring how to depict an individual experience of tinnitus
Bandak Nym: 1959/60
The ‘figure/ground’ images made by Aboriginal Australians of “The Dreaming” evolved out of an animist creation narrative and can be understood as belonging to a “timeless time” of formative creation. They are not fixed images, more like maps used to work out where you are both physically and psychically. Their work effortlessly fuses different viewpoints together and I owe a deep debt to a culture I have never witnessed but whose continuing existence reminds me that there have been and always will be many alternative ways of depicting our various realities.Perhaps the most constant figure-ground or dual image in my work over this time has been that of the body / landscape. We sometimes think of our bodies as small things that inhabit an ever expanding landscape but when we begin to have to focus on our insides, such as during a time of illness, our bodies become the totality of the world we live in. There is of course a flow between the two views, at one moment I stumble and a pain in my foot becomes the centre of my attention and a few moments later, a rumbling sound in the distance takes up all of my perceptual energy, as I try to work out if a storm is coming my way.
Stomach awareness
In the image above I was trying to construct a representation of the feelings that emerge from my stomach. From hunger to nagging indigestion, via rumblings of nervous responses to facing difficult issues, my stomach seems to digest emotional feelings as much as food. It is a complex thing and I never see it, I only feel it, unless of course I have a nasty accident.
Storm clouds with lightening
It is no accident that we think of the adjective ‘rumbling’ to describe both a stomach or a storm.
I have returned to how to depict this, as well as finding images for my chest and breathing issues many times and if the images are to operate as I want them to, they need to sit on a fence between figure and ground, if not they become too static and cannot breathe or as in the case of the stomach, be able to communicate the movement of peristaltic waves. In Chinese medicine a stomach ache might be described as a malignant wind. ‘Feng’, the Chinese word for ‘wind’, has a wider meaning, as an invisible power that works in a way similar to how a howling wind bends a tree. It can ‘blow’ diseases through the body that result in aches, sickness, tremors, headaches, dizziness or fever and it can operate both internally and externally. An internal imbalance of energy or an external confusion created by a too complex environment may receive similar treatments, in both cases treatments would look to ways to induce calm.
A flow of embodied energies
As always a balance is required, total stillness may be due to death and the flicking/ticking of awareness is a good sign of life. However too sedentary or too active lives become stressful; so take a deep breath and whilst you engage with what’s going on, watch how the world flips from one reading to another.
Reference:
Fields, R.D., Araque, A., Johansen-Berg, H., Lim, S.S., Lynch, G., Nave, K.A., Nedergaard, M., Perez, R., Sejnowski, T. and Wake, H., (2014) Glial biology in learning and cognition. The neuroscientist, 20(5), pp.426-431.