Embodiment

To understand something, when I say I need to ‘wrap my head around it’, I don’t just mean it metaphorically. There is a physical element to this wrapping – infolding and enfolding. A mental rotation and a physical one. Undergoing layers of internalisation, not ingestion in its typical sense. But definitely an absorption. I then roll it around, in my head, with my tongue, in my hands, with my muscles.  

I have to understand how I can relate to it, where I locate it; it is more than seeing, it is site—situating, positioning, aligning, sitting, standing, moving. Around this thing, I am trying to understand. It is like a spatial relation between me and it. These elements all have physical attributes, things which are led by the body. ‘It all [comes] back to experience…it has to be physical’ (Piene, C. 2021) as ‘everything substantial I have ever learned, I learned through being in my body. (Litalien, C. 2017)

It was the conversation De-figuring the Body, where the artist Chloe Piene talks of this understanding process that something clicked for me. She said, ‘I…subject myself to all kinds of physical experiences in order to understand the subject matter. Everything for me is so much about lived real experience. And so, I will go and do things in order to explore something…and for me, that's how I understand… it's a synthesis…of what I've done before…somehow gets synthesised in a way that they just start to speak their own language…through me’ (Piene, C. 2021). This was when I discovered what embodiment meant, and it took on a new meaning for my practice, so much so that I would now argue that embodiment is a crucial methodology for me. 

The notion of embodiment inherently exists in a sort of hinterland of understanding, as an area beyond. It is an ‘uneasy two-headed thinking in the act’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014. viii). In fact, I don’t even know if we can call it ‘two-headed’, because the ‘head’ is not ‘the sole locus of cognitive thinking… our senses and entire bodily being directly structure, produce and store silent existential knowledge.’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 13). I am trying to move beyond the state in which we ‘largely ignore the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves’ (Van Der Kolk, 2014. pg. 104) and the frequency with which our senses are ‘exploited’ and ‘undervalued’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 13). Practitioner Carolyn Spring, who writes, speaks, and trains in trauma recovery, puts this assumption beautifully that ‘in our modern, 21st-century arrogance, we reckon that we’re thinking machines first and bodies second: that we have bodies really just so that we can get around and go where we want to in order for our brains to have a good time’ (Spring, C. 2021). One of her passions is in understanding the evolution of humans and paying homage to the plain and simple fact that despite all our cognitive capabilities, ‘we have evolved as hominins over the last two million years with big bodies and relatively tiny brains’ (Spring, C. 2021). Surely that difference in scale highlights the importance of being and the body and that ‘we have sadly forgotten that we do not live in our bodies but are ourselves embodied constitutions. Embodiment is not a secondary experience; the human existence is fundamentally an embodied condition.’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 13).

‘When I think of my body, and what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels’ (Massumi, B. 2002. pg. 1). Embodiment is a way of getting to know the world by touching it, ‘we are connected with the world through our senses’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 13) and ‘touch reiterates our connections’ (Henry Moore Institute, 2021). Touch is an interaction of the body with the surrounding environment (Wikipedia, 2022)Think about the gesture of going to touch something; you have to reach to touch it; this is an intention set within your whole hand and arm – it is a bodily movement – it is an extension of yourself. In this same way, embodiment comes to align with drawing practice, an extension of yourself with your drawn subject. ‘…Drawing [is a] spatial and haptic exercise that fuses the external reality of space and matter, and the internal reality of perception, thought and mental imagery into singular and dialectic entities. As I sketch a contour of an object…I actually touch and feel the surface of the subject of my attention, and unconsciously I sense and internalise its character’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 89). 

It is that ingestion I spoke of, it is a way of wrapping your head around something, rolling it around in your brain and your body. Synthesising something to understand it, as ‘understanding something isn’t a quality that comes to us from the outside; it comes from within’ (Pallassma, J. 2009. pg. 127). Inherently embodied, I am using drawing as my way of reiterating this touch.