Body-World

Society oversees day-to-day life quite enough; we are guided by our communities, helped how to feel by friends and told how to think by institutions. Explanation, instruction and advice abounds – most of the time the wheels need oiling in this way, but at times of terrible personal crisis all that can be heard are the clichés of civil reasoning. Structures that once secured advantage, become utterly unusable. All that is left is the unbearable…. but at least that’s the truth and at least it feels real.

So imagine a meadow on a sunny hillside where you can run in any direction, as fast as you want. Like Julie Andrews you can spin with your arms stretched out towards the distant mountains with the air around you and the wind in your clothes. That’s real… I can’t think of anything more essential.

Now imagine this: You are on that sunny hillside but instead of breathing in the mountain air as you twirl, your lungs must take in fluid. Water is your habitat. Water is all around you. It goes inside your body and back out again… it’s part of you; it IS you. Of course the body breathes air not water, but how much more viscerally intertwined with the world does our existence seem when our attention is pricked by metaphor?

So, if breathing is an act of assimilation, does the body assimilate the world, or does the world assimilate the body? And are such questions of duality a feature of perception too? For example, do my eyes let the world in, or do they let me out, into the world? Is it still reasonable to think of the (inside) body and the (outside) world as separate, unconnected realms? 

‘August, No. 1’ (below) by David Saunders, is the consequence of assimilating the world and letting it back out again; an expression of mediation. The painting’s ‘interior’ has asymmetrical cohesion tuned to a frequency shared with the physical inhabitation of our three-dimensional world. It’s a micro-world.

When I first viewed the painting I felt it more than saw it; I walked in – moved around from one element to another; uncovering and exposing. It all happened before I had time to think about it. It was navigable but it wasn’t a journey, or a narrative, it was envelopment. Eye to mind, face to thought, place to place.

… David Saunders’ painting prompted a note-to-self: ‘reset reality gauge to primordial.’

© Della Gooden

‘Body-World’ was written after seeing the work of David Saunders; it was commissioned by Richard Bell (curator of the exhibition ‘Transforming Surfaces’) & G R Thomson for the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition at Arthouse1 Gallery, London 2017 (this work was shown in the exhibition)