Outward Wits

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"Outward Wits"
by Emily Dylan
(Digital Collage, Photography, Ink & Paper)

Outward Wits is inspired by the connection we have to our physical senses and the goal of becoming more in touch with our inner senses.

A quick blurb on the history of the title...

In the Elizabethan era commonly people were believed to have two kinds of wits, both inward and outward wits.

This concept of the five senses arose from the days of Aristotle [originally we were thought to have only four outward wits, taste was not considered it own sense but rather a specialized form of touch] and has become deeply ingrained into our current understanding of the senses, this is why you always hear people refer to senses outside of the main five being some sort of sixth sense.

During this period of early modern english, wit and sense were synonymous in meaning. The fives senses (sight, taste, touch, scent, hearing) being our outward wits and the inner wits having more to do with the process of the mind (Common Sense, Imagination, Fantasy, Estimation & Memory.) Estimation in this case was what we today would refer to as the concept of intuition. This idea of having "inward wits" as it was then defined has greatly changed with advancements in psychological study and philosophical thinking...

These days sense is defined as a physical process in which sensory systems respond to stimuli as we now consider many other more complicated factors of perception and perceptual systems (ex. Spatial Orientation,Pain & Kinaesthesia relating to the sense of body positioning)💡

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My statement on this piece...

Sensory input can be a very baffling thing sometimes, somedays I find my head getting wrapped up in all sorts of chaos when I feel overwhelmed by my physical senses (Commonplace background noise being so loud I cant think straight, horrid textures that make my skin want to crawl, unexplained sensations of burning and stinging and just generally being so focused on one sense I feel unable to process the world around me efficiently, its like my life has lag or the dial for "everything" is suddenly cranked up to 11 if ya know what I mean. For many of these reasons I find things like large public gatherings uninviting. This feeling of vulnerability often leads to a paranoid state of mind which does not help my anxious state. The loss of control of what should come easily leads to a slip in control of what could be described as the "Inward Wits" .

Although I have developed many strategies for dealing with physical sensations that are less than pleasant, as well as the mental ones, becoming overstimulated can make me feel like a raw nerve and its hard to turn that off easily. It's frustrating, and sometimes the best place to put the feelings that frustrate us is into the images of our art.

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