Ebook: The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts: Making and Experiencing Sculpture

This is the first book to provide experiential and theoretical grounds for integrating the bodily, somatic senses into our understanding of how we make and engage with visual art. The somatic senses include touch, kinaesthesia, proprioception, balance, temperature, gut feelings, emotions, pain and pleasure, and range from surface contact to deep internal stirrings. They connect the outer world to one’s innermost “body-mind”, making the body both a field that perceives and interacts with art. Rosalyn Driscoll shows how using that touching can deepen what we know through seeing, and even serve as a genuine alternative to sight. She proposes that tactile, somatic memory and experience is embedded in visual perception of art. Awareness of the somatic senses offers rich aesthetic and perceptual possibilities for art making and appreciation.
Written by Rosalyn Driscoll, a visual artist who spent years making tactile, haptic sculpture, the book conveys her understanding of the nature of touch and the somatic senses and how they may be consciously integrated into creating and perceiving artworks. The book considers the basic elements of the somatic senses: the perceptual, existential differences between touch and sight; the reciprocal nature of touch; the objective and subjective dimensions of touch; the structure, abilities and potential of the hand; the centrality of motion and emotion; haptic time, space and memory; somatic visualization and imagination; and the implications of haptic, somatic awareness for artists, art museums and the culture at large. This will be of use for students of museum studies, fine art, art history and sensory studies.