Awareness drawings: the emergence of the material culture of the living body

Abstract

Across the history of bodily representation, one form continues to pose numerous methodological challenges when exploring the culture of bodily experience: the awareness drawing. When a conscious subject draws their own body, it prompts a number of questions about the understanding of the living body constructed by the individual based on their habitus and the disclosive value of the act of drawing. 

This article presents a methodological analysis, grounded in the historical evolution of different visual methodologies for perceiving the living body through the lived body: from anatomical silhouettes to freehand drawing, and from projective methods to expressive practices. The unique features of each method reveal specific limitations and potentials, while also probing the conscious and unconscious dynamics that underpin embodiment. 

In freehand drawing method, participants comment on their own drawings, thereby analysing the embodied practices in a more integrated, contextualized language. Based on field research with performers in a circus and patients, the anthropological relationship to the living body appears as a narrative in the first person.