The art of Seeing: Metaphor & Meaning
with Mary Attwood
Thursday 25th June 2026
7.00-8.00pm (UK time) Online Via Zoom
£10
The Art of Seeing: Metaphor & Meaning
“Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world.”
Dr Iain McGilchrist
This session will be recorded.
This month’s The Art of Seeing will explore a single work of art through the lens of metaphor and meaning.
It can be easy to look at works of art only from a literal viewpoint. We may have gathered information and historical facts about them, and understand what they are showing us in terms of the myths they present, the characters they depict, or the scenes from everyday life they portray. This is a crucial aspect of our understanding. Yet it is not the only one. If we remain only at this level, we miss a much deeper encounter—one that might illuminate not only our relationship to the work of art itself, but also alter our perception of the world around us.
Metaphor is, as Dr Iain McGilchrist writes, “the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world” and, indeed, the only way truly to understand the world. The word metaphor literally means “to carry across” or “to carry beyond”, acting as a bridge in our understanding from one place to another. When we see works of art not merely as containing a literal meaning or narrative, but as metaphorical in nature, our vision is widened and deepened, and new vistas we might previously have missed open up. In this sense, metaphor offers a way of breaking through a kind of haze or blindness in our vision, taking us into the heart of things.
The work of art will not be revealed until the evening of the session, so as to allow for as direct an encounter as possible.
This session offers a tripartite approach of theory, practice and reflection and you are encouraged to participate as much or as little as you wish.
About
Mary Attwood
(art historian, writer, producer)
Mary is co-founder and director of The Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, an art historian, author, mentor and producer. She is co-founder and director of Channel McGilchrist, was the founding Chairman of the Victoria branch of 90,000 member strong The Arts Society, is a qualified practitioner of yoga, meditation and mindfulness, has published two books with Watkins, and published an ancestral family book with the CFHT in 2023. She holds a BA hons degree in the History of Art from UCL and Birkbeck, where she focused on late medieval and renaissance Art and Architeture. She holds an MA with distinction in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred from CCCU where she researched renaissance art and art’s effects in general on the viewer/ beholder. Taking as broad an epistemological approach as possible, she studied the meaning/s of art, specifically quattrocento Florentine Renaissance art, in the contexts of ancient Greek philosophy, the neuroscientific approach of McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, archetypal psychology and Renaissance artistic approaches.
