Bathed in Pleasure

I was walking through a junk yard one day when I came across an old discarded bathtub which over time had collected rainwater. I imagined that this may have once been an instrument of divine pleasure to some stranger in the past, laying there enjoying the pleasure of a warm bath. The vision of a floating body and a floating brain, one in a tub the other inside a skull led me to ponder these analogous images while imagining the complexity of processes operating within the brain to allow one to experience such pleasurable sensations. Neurological terms such as ‘Reward Circuit’ and ‘Nucleus Accumbens’ quickly sprang to mind as did the notion of the chemical of desire, Dopamine. I thought about all the functions of the brain working away to produce those wonderful feelings of pleasure associated with taking a nice warm bath. Working as always beyond the scope of awareness of our everyday consciousness; functioning in this ‘inverted’ like reality, beyond and in absolute contrast to the world which we perceive on a daily basis. These thoughts led me to the challenge of capturing the concept of this duality in a photographic image. I then had the idea of using Photoshop to convert my original positive image of the tub into its negative aspect in my attempt to produce a photographic work that simultaneously resembled an x-ray scan of a brain while retaining the structural form of a bath tub. The final work is derived from a single original image i.e. it is not a composite or collage of multiple images.