The fantasies in my head don’t fit inside her.

For Descartes, the human being is composed of two fundamentally different elements: the material body and the non-material mind. The body belongs to the physical world and is subject to its laws, whereas thought belongs to another realm—the realm of consciousness.

This leads to the classic division:

— The body can be seen and measured; — Consciousness cannot be directly observed; — The body occupies space; — Thought has no physical form.

This gives rise to the dualism of body and mind—the idea that the physical organism and the inner world of a person are distinct entities.

This forms the starting point for my work. Medical photographs depict the person as a physical body: their face, a tumor, a scar, their measurements, and anatomical features. But behind this physical image lies the inner world of the individual, a realm that cannot be photographed or measured.

Merleau-Ponty challenges the Cartesian division between body and consciousness. For him, the body is not merely a material shell that a person «wears, ” but the foundation of human perception and experience.

Humans perceive the surrounding world through their bodies:

— through sight, — touch, — movement, — sensation, — body position in space.

Therefore, consciousness cannot be entirely separated from embodied experience.

The body becomes the intermediary between the individual and the world. Changes in the body can alter how a person perceives surrounding reality and themselves.

Susan Oldward explores the human brain as a physical object and simultaneously as a carrier of consciousness, memory, and personality. In her works, scientific visualizations of the brain become a means of articulating what cannot be directly seen—the internal «self» of a human being.Of particular importance is the paradox of her practice: the brain becomes an object that the person attempts to examine and understand, even though this very perception is carried out by that same brain.

This results in a closed system:

— the brain creates thoughts; — the person uses those thoughts to explore the brain; — the brain becomes an image of itself.

Oldward draws upon medical visualization, but redirects it from the realm of diagnosis toward an exploration of identity and consciousness.

Helen Pinor works at the intersection of art, medicine, anatomy, and photography. She addresses human organs and the body as physical objects, yet simultaneously reveals their strangeness, vulnerability, and almost surreal nature. In her work, the medical image ceases to be a neutral document. An organ or part of the body begins to be perceived not merely as a biological structure, but as a vessel of memory, personality, and human experience.

Her practice raises the question of how truly possible it is to know a person.

One can explore: — organs, — tissues, — blood, — the brain, — anatomy, but what about the element that remains invisible—what is happening inside the mind?

I believe the series could be based on portraits taken from old neurosurgery textbooks, transferred onto wet fabric using liquid acrylic to depict the blurriness and diffusion of the image—how it gradually loses photographic sharpness and begins to resemble MRI scans or clusters of neural connections. Crucially, we must retain the lifelike gaze of the subjects, while adding clarity to the top, superimposed over the watercolor-like washes, using thick acrylic for the second layer. In the lower-left corner of the finished portrait, I propose attaching a small photograph of the same portrait, mimicking an outpatient chart.

In addition to the portraits, I propose creating a series of images of excised tumors, which in old textbooks are displayed alongside a tape measure indicating their size. I want to maintain this medical method of documentation but alter the meaning of the images: these objects will symbolize the fantasies and thoughts that do not «fit» in the head and must literally be «pulled» out of it so that a person can live. Thus, medical language connects with the subjective and the poetic: a physical object can be measured, but the human inner world always proves to be larger than what a medical photograph can capture.