Extreme Imagination!

I always assumed that everybody's inner eye worked as busily as mine, until a Facebook friend suggested that I should submit some work to  the first Extreme Imagination event.

My first conversation with the curator of the exhibition revealed that I sit at the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum - i.e. I have particularly vivid visual imagery, often including movement as well as colour, texture, detail.  

• Hyperphantasia is the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. It is the opposite condition to aphantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. The experience of hyperphantasia is more common than aphantasia, and has been described as "as vivid as real seeing".

Most of my artwork comes either from observation (things that others ignore but that I take out of context, magnify and extend beyond recognition) or collation (collage and assemblage, combining found items and imagery in an intuitive and playful way).   The main role hyperphantasia plays in these processes is that I can do most of the preparation in my head by visualising items on different backgrounds:  where other artists use sketchbooks to work through alternative lay-outs and colourways, I can run a sort of ‘slide show’ past my inner eye. 

Even so, once I start working, the image generated in my head is only a starting point which changes and evolves through the process - in the same way that the final sketch in a development by a neurotypical or aphantasic artist is often just the beginning of further evolution.

However, some of my artwork is based purely on visual imagination.

 Occasionally, a fully formed motif appears spontaneously and unbidden, such as ‘unfinished business’, a symbol that appeared fully formed to me one night at bedtime.  I made a quick sketch of the form (a doughnut shape with a slice missing, cracked and breaking) and over the next few years made different versions of the motif in drawings, paintings and woodcuts. One of the later paintings was included in the first Extreme Imagination exhibition.  

More frequently, the 'visions' are generated by emotions, thought processes or physical sensations. The strongest point of origin for me is music. It has to be live music, ideally ‘abstract’  such as minimalism or other contemporary compositions.  

‘Slow Movement’ for example appeared while listening to an orchestral performance of a piece called, you guessed it, ‘slow movement’.

Another manifestation of hyperphantasia is that every abstract notion, every concept, has a physical, three-dimensional shape for me.  In painting or printmaking, I then have to reduce this shape back down to a flat image.  

The series of card prints which I  submitted for the 2021 Extreme Imagination conference and exhibition is an attempt to visualise various mental states and processes.  The resulting prints are all called ‘states of mind’ - rather than labelling them as specific emotions, intentions or thought processes, I would leave it to you to decide if they match your personal experience.

Printmaking seems a particularly appropriate process for this project, as the process is somewhat similar to the way our mind works.  Thought processes and emotional reactions employ fixed templates which have usually been provided in childhood - this is the printing plate, which tends to be used again and again, producing similar results every time.  The ink colour and density is variable, and may represent mood, conscious choice, external influences that can change at any time. 

The images - and states of mind - that result from these combinations are variations on a theme, similar but different.  The very act of running the plate and paper through the rollers of an old-fashioned printing press is an attractive metaphor for mental processes.  Indeed, “imprinting” is a behaviourist term for a type of learning, and forming attachments.

Additionally, I include snippets of text or imagery taken from magazines or books, readymades that are sandwiched between the plate and the press - random bits of information that blend with our early conditioning and our current emotional colour to create a new and complex state of mind.

This series - appropriately, I feel - is work in progress.  My state(s) of mind keep changing and evolving.