Scribing the Soul

Artist Susan Aldworth's interest in neuroscience was triggered during an emergency cerebral angiogram in 1999, while observing her brain's structure on a monitor. “You are looking inside your head while thinking, seeing, feeling; your brain is working while you are looking inside it,” she marvelled.

In 2005, as artist-in-residence at the Royal London Hospital, UK, Aldworth sketched works on location in hospital clinics and collaborated with consultant neuroradiologist Paul Butler and neuropsychologist Paul Broks.

Scribing the Soul is her personal exploration of how matter becomes mind. Now on display in Oxford, UK, the exhibition will move to galleries across the United Kingdom next month.

In a series of prints entitled Brainscape, Aldworth chose etching as a medium for exploring cognition because, like neurotransmission, it uses chemical reactions. Delicate surface effects were created by drawing on metal plates with marker pens and then dipping the plates quickly in acid. Ghostly lines flicker across the surfaces of the etchings, printed from the blue-inked plates. Her fast etching process is a metaphor for rapidly firing cerebral neurons, and the resulting cognitive 'blueprints' capture the nanoseconds when “flesh thinks”.

Cerebral art: Susan Aldworth's Between a Thing and a Thought. Credit: S. ALDWORTH

The surfaces of 20 etched plates, displayed as a wall-mounted grid, simultaneously absorb and reflect light, alternately evoking dull and scintillating thoughts. In two kaleidoscopic films, images of Aldworth's brain obtained during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan are incorporated as a sequence of rapidly changing frames.

Aldworth's latest series of etchings, The Self is a Shadow Puppet, dramatizes the convoluted topography of the brain, its neural network and blood vessels. In one, a pair of ghostly hands reaches out of the dark background towards a disembodied brain, straining to touch its intangible, mysterious consciousness.

In his introduction to the exhibition, Broks makes the argument that our understanding of consciousness benefits from artists and scientists looking at it collaboratively. “The self is a shadow puppet shaped by the firings of a hundred billion brain cells,” he writes. “These are conceptual conundrums. Intractable to current science, they call for an artistic response.”