Dear World
Collaboration with Elisa van der Plas & the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging
This collaboration was part of Dear World, a project which explores mental health. It paired seven artists with seven researchers from the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, to create new artwork for an exhibition at Stour Space in East London.
I worked with Elisa van der Plas, who researches advice taking and decision making. After reading her paper ‘Advice-taking as a bridge between decision neuroscience and mental capacity’ our collaboration started with a series of meetings where we discussed our disciplines and Elisa further explained her work to me.
Early on we decided to represent four of the mental processes that she researches: Privately and publicly held beliefs, (where people publicly express beliefs that are distinct from private convictions) Metacognition, (the process of thinking about your own thought processes) Mentalizing, (The process of thinking about other people's thought processes) and Confidence (a persons estimation of being correct).
We wanted to create something beautiful and interesting to look at, not purely a diagram, but we still wanted the piece to refer to the mental processes that she studies with some clarity. So I sent to Elisa a series of simple sketches, asking her if she could tell which of the mental processes they represented to establish that I understood the concepts in her work, and could visualise them in an effective way.
These sketches were combined and worked up into a final draft, which was vectorised to be laser cut and etched in multiple layers of plywood. The layers were then sanded, painted and glued together to create the final piece.
The resulting artwork ‘A Sense of Direction’ depicts five different people interacting with one another around a simple choice: whether to go left or right. This simple decision highlights some of the many complex interactions that may inform our daily decisions, and contains the four mental processes that we looked at.
The artwork was presented alongside cards which showed crops of the image and explained each process in some detail. Viewers were invited to write their reflections on each process on these cards, and present them alongside the artwork.
