Sketches for the trance architecture of
@lewiswalker_x Bornsick, produced by
@serpentineuk @kostasstas and
@edartfest @kim.mcaleese , premiered at the Round Chapel in May.
I’ll be sharing more about the experience of working on this piece, which infused 2025 with magic and meaning.
These drawings map the hypnosis sequence that Lewis wanted woven into the work.
When I compose a group hypnosis with a specific arc — rather than developing it live through improvisation — I sketch the inner and outer dynamics of the process.
It’s a form of somatic tracing and visual mapping, a way of thinking through the body and hand.
Taking out the words leaves a dialogue between eye, paper and unconscious.
Over the past three years this has become part of my method. It really made me realise how changing the medium changes the access.
Sketching trance seems to open different channels of implicit thinking:
heightening automatism, reducing executive control, allowing latent structure to emerge. The total absence of formal drawing skill may be precisely what enables this: less virtuosity, more access.
Image index
Image 1 and 2 my sketch for Bornsick
Image 3 Voynich Manuscript, legendarily spirited from England to Central Europe by Dr. John Dee
Image 4 facsimile Havass Talisman Ottoman book
Image 5 : the mystical body of tantric meditation and the flow of the life force, prana, throughout the body
@wellcomecollection
Image 6 The Body as Alchemical Laborator, Engraving in Joachim Becher, Physica subterranea (Leipzig, 1738), frontispiece
Image 7 From Theosophia Practica, by Johann Georg Gichtel, 1696 - subtle anatomy. Planetary correspondences.
Image 8 Bloodletting points and moxa points on the human body. Gouache painting, Tibet
#trance #bornsick #serpentinegallery #alchemy #anatomy tantric
