‘I think therefore I am’: When Descartes wrote this famous phrase in 1637, he pithily encapsulated a philosophical position which would come to hold prominence over human conceptions of the self for centuries to come. The post-Enlightenment notion of the mind-body divide has consistently sought to privilege the mind, systematically characterising it as masculine, rational, and white, while the body has been designated as its opposite.

Pervading culture, social structures, and our relationship with the more-than-human world, the suppression of the body in favour of the compartmentalised psyche has been used to privilege capitalist, patriarchal and colonialist forms of knowledge. This binary approach is a synecdoche for the wider system of oppression that has been used to fuel the plunder of the environment, devaluing and othering sensorial experience alongside other species and non-dominant social groups. In labelling the mind as immaterial, the body is designated part of the material world – and that world is consequently deemed less valuable, as are racialised and gendered groups who are perceived as closer to the body and thus further from ‘rational’ thought.

For some artists working today, painting offers a means of subverting this divisive approach. The exhibition Embodied Forms: Painting Now at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery (September 2024) brought together new work by seven young painters who are attempting to challenge the perceived separation of the mind and body. These artists are attempting to move away from the idea of the self-contained human being, looking instead to a state of embodiment in which the self is always formed in relation to other entities.

Across the exhibition, artists embrace the inherent fluidity of paint; the borders of bodies become porous, dissolving into surroundings that suggest landscapes, geological strata, or imagined spaces. These canvases challenge the traditional hierarchies of subject and object, foreground and background, portrait and landscape. The resulting works interrogate the ways in which we exist as bodies in our environments, often demonstrating a vital ecological sensibility that looks to embodiment as a means of accessing alternative forms of selfhood and knowledge.

Painting has traditionally been seen as the creative work of the rational mind; the artist is allowed a disembodied hand brought under strict control, but the holistic body is not considered to play a key role. This hierarchical erasure is challenged by Carolina Aguirre, who explains that her process of making is very bodily. ‘I paint on the floor, and my whole practice is very watery – I have to be careful not to slip. The painting becomes an environment with its own smells and textures.’

‘I’m trying to leave a trace of the body, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between the body and the natural environment that it's in,’ Aguirre says. Her practice is an attempt to expand the body beyond its socially accepted boundaries: ‘We already know scientifically that the body is porous, through studies of the microbiome or the way in which dark matter passes through us,” she explains. “And this idea that we're solid individuals is just that – an idea. In a very embodied way, the painting tries to dissolve that idea a bit.’

Painter YaYa Yajie Liang expresses a similar interest in the porosity of the body and the dissolution of the mind-body divide: ‘As human beings living in the context of climate change and the pandemic, we have become aware of the permeability, instability, and vulnerability of the body,” she says. 'For me, the boundaries between the body and the environment have been blurred or even disappeared.’

For Liang, this is facilitated by a process of making connections with other species, working through the lens of queer ecology. ‘As a human being, there is always a chance to get close to other beings. Looking at fungi, for example, gives me an opportunity to think differently about what it means to be human in the age of man made ecological catastrophe. Fungi blur the distinction between living and not-living; they have taught me that living is a process of metamorphosis in a continuous cycle.’

One of the paintings on view in Embodied Forms was inspired by Liang’s experience of hiking along the Seven Sisters white cliff path in the South Downs and her realisation that the chalk ground beneath her feet could be seen as a huge fossil depository. ‘Over millions of years here, minerals have turned into animals which have turned into rocks. I had a feeling that in the future I would become part of that fossil. There’s an inevitable intimacy with other beings.’

Her paintings are irrepressibly colourful, the forms of many indistinct species swirling and feathering into one another, joyfully visualising expansive ways of being that are not confined to a narrow view of either mind or body. Sensorial and psychological states run into one another via the materiality of the liquid paint, hinting at how in both its making and its manifestations art can become an essential tool for reimagining how the human condition might be expressed.

This is just one way in which art can help us to engage with environmental knowledge that sits outside familiar capitalist-colonial systems of binary information. We are taught to deny our sensorial reality and our kinship with other beings, and we are instead encouraged to see our surroundings as inanimate resources and products. The mercurial and exploratory qualities of art can help us to look past the Cartesian desire to elevate educated human intelligence above other forms of knowing, encouraging an openness to embodied, nonhuman, or non-Western ways of thinking which may hold hope for a more environmentally just future.

Carolina Aguirre compares her bodily floor-based practice to archaeology or gardening: ‘The open-ended narratives emerge through an instinctual embodied process that is curious and fluid, rather than premeditated or fixed,’ she says. ‘It's endlessly surprising, because you allow things to come into your field of knowledge that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.’

‘And I think that has a parallel in our relationship with the natural world, because if we put ourselves and our human perspectives on a pedestal, we fail to open ourselves up to sensorial or more numinous connections with the more-than-human – connections which hold an extraordinary wealth of knowledge.’