The Encyclopaedia of Crazy animals grew out of my ambition to use neuroscience as a tool to improve my drawing. The project came about because I am interested the complex relationship between fixed reason and plastic imagination. This relationship, which was first alluded to by the Greek philosopher Plato, is at the heart of the way the mind makes sense of the world through categorisation and visual grammar.

Drawing is about communicating through engaging with the virtual world of sight which appears to us are a sort of cinema in our heads. This cinema screen lights up when we open our eyes and imagine in our dreams. The images are constructed from data that has originally been collected through our eyes and processed through our central brains and finely refined in the occipital lobes at the back of our brains.

The plasticity of imaginative sight, and the rigidity of reasoned sight, are melded together in the way we see movement. The balance between these two elements make it possible to draw the movement of a ballet dancer.

My encyclopaedia pushes the balance between plasticity and what reason is willing to believes to the extremes. Looking at these extremes tells me about the rules that underpin the grammar of sight (another huge subject about which I intend to write about in my blog posts). For the moment lets just enjoy these images!