THIS FATAL SUBJECT: BLOG

Transition Gallery Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN
www.transitiongallery.co.uk info@transitiongallery.co.uk 07941 208566 / 020 7254 4202

SCRIBING THE SOUL
SUSAN ALDWORTH
Friday - Sunday noon - 6.00pm
26 July – 17 August 2008
Private View Fri 25 July 6-9pm

Susan Aldworth’s new show at Bethnal Green’s Transition Gallery is the final venue of the national tour of Scribing the Soul . The work will show for the first time many of the drawings behind her multi media works about the brain and consciousness. Aldworth works at the interface of art and science. The work is a response to looking directly into the brain and asking questions about who we are. Based on research with scientists and medics and collaborations with other artists, her creative response to gray matter has become as broad as the range of mediums she employs – from etching and printmaking to animation and installation. This exhibition is the result of her tracking consciousness over the past seven years.

GALLERY TALKS:

Sunday 27 July 3.00pm: Seeing the mind: do art and science meet?
Dr Caterina Albano, Research Fellow/Curator, Artakt, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

Thursday 7th August 7.00pm States of Mind: an artist’s exploration of the brain and consciousness through drawing and etching.
Gill Saunders, Senior Curator (Prints) Word and Imaging Department at the V&A, in conversation with Susan Aldworth.

Near death experiences are widely reported, and the subject of much argument. If indeed it is the case that people have risen out of their bodies and hovered above them, while their body is unconscious or clinically dead, this has huge implications for our knowledge of what consciousness is. It would mean it, ‘you’,  doesn’t have to ‘live’ in the brain or be part of it, but a separate (or separable) entity. together with the rest of the common features of NDE’s,( ie the life review, the visitations of dead loved ones, awareness of peace, things making sense, some sort of presiding intelligence ) then that would suggest a life for consciousness outside the physical, and maybe beyond death. (Quantum physics makes this seem less daft than before… but even if true, it doesn’t seem to lend any weight to organised religions and their arbitrary rules and regs and putting people down for being gay.) OTOH, scientists trying to discredit the NDE’s as transcendental experiences, and establish them as physical symptoms in a beleagured brain, don’t seem very convincing, and even unscientific in their determination to prove something wrong rather than find out the truth. If oxygen starvation etc can produce these symptoms, in those who are resuscitated to report on it, the extreme clarity of thought reported doesn’t seem to fit with the hazy confusion such conditions normally cause. Also, just because you can induce certain symptoms artificially, eg by stimulation of certain brain areas, that doesn’t mean there aren’t identical or near identical symptoms caused by ‘real’ experience. just cause they make artificial pine disinfectant, don’t mean there are no xmas trees. Just because a drunk may slur ‘I love you, you know, you’re my mate you are’ or ‘come outside and say that’ to total strangers, doesn’t mean love and hate don’t independently exist. However one can think of evolutionary advantages, maybe to the clan as a whole, of individuals near death feeling euphoric about it and hence untraumatised in their future lives if they survive. in which case, such a mechanism would be infinitely more valuable for anyone undergoing serious trauma which they’re certainly going to survive, and yet such lesser though severe trauma cause crippling PTSD. Round and round we go… maybe we’re not supposed to know? 

Death has a way of bringing us up short, in more ways than one. I revisited  my hospital residency the other night, for a party to launch a series of poetry boards (including three of my poems) which will circulate round the waiting areas, and hopefully be a change from dog-eared Heat magazines. My mate, poet and playwright Char March, has done much valuable work like the above, and it was good to catch up with her and John Siddique and other writers I know.  Being back in the cancer wing also brought back emotions I hadn’t expected, from my experiences working with very ill or dying people in the cancer and ortho wards. But the most salutary shock was to learn of the sudden death of one of the nursing staff in charge of a ward I’d worked on. Helpful, cheerful, authoritative, working day in day out with mostly elderly people in pain and dying, young, and now just not there any more. We think of the terminally ill as those who have crossed a boundary and gone beyond us, but we are all there with them, all the time.  

 Two babies’ bodies have been found in boxes in a house left behind by an elderly woman who died.  In early reports, one in a pink box, one in a blue, put together in one bigger box. they seem to have been there for a long time. There are many explanations I can think of for them being there, though speculation is pointless at this stage. What strikes me, is the way it’s reported: naturally, the press would be interested, I’ve no issue with that. It’s just, describing dead babies as a ‘grim discovery’ and worse, a ‘grisly find’ makes me feel indignant on the childrens’ behalf. Grisly means frightful, horrific, nasty etc. Maybe I’m just sentimental. Is death in physical form always grisly? it’s dehumanising as a term for what must be a sad and tragic situation, however it came about.

maybe the success of right wing parties/candidates in the May 1 elections makes this more relevant - all our brains are black, and they get blacker as we get older and wiser. I’ve seen it, the pigment deep inside the brain, in slide samples, produced by those cute little neurones working and thinking away, and it grows more visible as years go by. so what price white supremacy? our brains are more ‘ourselves’ than our skin surely?  So far we’ve had white matter, grey matter, dark matter, in my brainy blog entries, now we’ve got black matter…  my own brain is in mourning for Ken and London. Blackened, with pollution not pigment,  will be the lungs of inner London’s children, as they breathe the exhaust fumes of the Kent motorists who voted for Boris to ban the congestion charge, while those affluent sorts cruise back to the leafy suburbs each night. Little bit of politics there…

A conversation with Valerie led me to choose Ventricular Fibrillation ( a cardiac event which frequently attends and advances the physical process of dying) as the first of the thanatoid motions with which to animate a waxwork body. She, alert to the suggestive nuances of the name of the condition, pointed out the delicacy of movement implicit in those quivering fibrils. It occurred to me that I’d no clear mental image of what a fibril might be, so I sought a definition:

fibril - a very slender natural or synthetic fiber filament, strand barb - one of the parallel filaments projecting from the main shaft of a feather cobweb, gossamer - filaments from a web that was spun by a spider chromatid - one of two identical strands into which a chromosome splits during mitosis myofibril, myofibrilla, sarcostyle - one of many contractile filaments that make up a striated muscle fiber rhizoid - any of various slender filaments that function as roots in mosses and ferns and fungi etc hypha - any of the threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus paraphysis - a sterile simple or branched filament or hair borne among sporangia; may be pointed or clubbed fiber, fibre - a slender and greatly elongated substance capable of being spun into yarn

The movement described by the term “ventricular fibrillation” would be, I had wrongly assumed, similarly etiolated and quivering, an exquisite shudder of the heart as its strength petered out. Further investigation made it clear that the matter was less aesthetic; every description I could find by anyone who had witnessed the event or held a fibrillating heart in their hand involved a sense of squirming muscle fibres in helpless, chaotic and ineffectual contraction. The image invoked , from Vesalius to the present, was “a bag of worms.” You can see an animated diagram of VF compared with a normal heartbeat here:

http://medmovie.com/mmdatabase/MediaPlayer.aspx?ClientID=65&TopicID=0

One of my research strands with for this project has been to work with older people - some with degrees of dementia or alzheimer’s. The work involved setting up three different types of arts projects - video, photographic and music. I came up against some profound problems in relation to consent and older people. Artists working with vulnerable people have to think seriously about consent if they want to use photgraphs or video in public exhibition. What constitutes meaningful consent? Who can give consent? Does consent have to be given everytime a work is shown in a public arena? What happens to the status of the consent if the consenting adult develops a mental condition which affects his/her ability to consent later? This must be a problem for documentary makers all the time. There has been a new human rights act in October 2007 which - as I understand it from legal information I have been given - means that relatives cannot consent on behalf of their parents or children. Although I can see merit in terms of human rights and fears over exploitation, I am worried that if we raise the bar of consent too high then it means there are certain things we are NEVER allowed to see. For instance if no-one with dementia or mental health problems can meaningfully consent to being filmed or photographed even if they are happy to , then it means that images of old age and how we treat our elders are hidden away. Who benefits from this? Can this be used as a kind of censorship as well? I know it depends on context. However, I am genuinely confused by this one. Any thought?

Have discussed the concept of telepathy with a couple of scientists lately. Much anecdotal evidence, but experiments of trying to transmit or receive pix of wavy lines and triangles seem rather inefficient. Possibly such an ability would be a survival instinct, responding, switched on even, by extreme situations or need or emotional bonds. One scientist, a neuroscientist, responded to my query ; if the human brain produces electricity, could this not be used to transmit thoughts and feelings? Her response, that the amount of electricity was nowhere near powerful enough to do this. The other scientist wondered if there might be some other mechanism as yet undiscovered for telepathy. I was reminded of my degree studies in physics, good ol’ quantum mechanics again. Could telepathy be analogous to quantum tunnelling? When photons or subatomic particles escape situations which in human terms would be equivalent to getting out of a locked cell without any openings. Reason for the discussion, after my father and I watched my mother’s final coma for two days, midway through the third day she suddenly began to die - breathing started to stop, eyes flashed open, and that was when my mobile rang - my brother, hundreds of miles away, who had said he wouldn’t ring and would wait to hear from us that she had died, (because it might have gone on for days longer) suddenly felt like ringing. I was able to tell him what I was seeing and hold the phone to her ear so he could speak to her in her last moments of life, though not discernible consciousness. Could she have ‘told’ him what was happening? Or just coincidence?

I suppose it’s because my own science training is in pure maths and theoretical physics, I keep seeing parallels between what i learn during TFS research with physics. Spending time with a professor of neurosurgery, i learn that as well as the nerve cells in the brain, there are astrocytes, recently discovered, mysterious, appearing to have vital roles in brain function, and that there are many more of them than nerve cells (and that the bigger a creature is, the higher the proportion of astrocytes to nerve cells - so size does  matter, who knew?) These astrocytes, seemed to me to be like the dark matter in the universe, unsuspected, mysterious, yet multitudinous, and they’ve even got a starry name! Are these parallels significant or just the way my brain works?

Talking to a neurochemical pathologist, discussing the effect of dementia,  I described what I’d observed in my own mother, how the abilities and concepts of the developing child ‘rewound’back to death, eg the concept that things are still  there when you can’t see them etc.  (her showing me how each time we went upstairs, her bedroom and wardrobes were all there! ‘Look! This is all here again!’And then when we went downstairs, they weren’t/we couldn’t see them. ).  Learning that the Alzheimer’s afflicted brain shrinks, from average 1200g down to perhaps 7-800g, I was struck by a parallel between the big bang/expanding universe theory, and how some say if the universe begins to contract, to the big crunch, time will run backwards: the shrinking, contracting brain in the dementia patient, coincides with a rewind of mental development.