Philosophy
I am a recovering philosopher.
Several years after completing my PhD, publishing in journals and lecturing at university, I now work out my ideas through film, painting, creative collaborations and our fantastic pop-up philosophy bar, staged in galleries, bars and cafés.
I am interested in still images: our need to make them, the strange ways in which they represent space and time, and how intimately they seem to be linked to our capacities for personal recollection and dreaming.
But mostly, I find them beautiful to look at.
Current Research
Paintings as Time Machines
Typically we say that the aesthetic qualities of a still picture depend solely on its spatial features; a curve here, a line there. Conversely, we consider the beauty of music to depend on its temporality, namely rhythm, melody, and cadence. The way the score is played, not how it looks on the page, is what matters. In slogan form, pictures are spatial, while music is temporal.
However, some paintings, such as 'Hammershoi’s Interior from Strandgade with Sunlight on the Floor' (1901) or Hopper’s 'Morning Sun' (1952), seem to aestheticize nostalgia and melancholy. There are also numerous other works we experience as being expressive of this or that emotion. This is puzzling if we believe that painting is a purely spatial, unchanging medium, because emotions both unfold and orient themselves in time. Theoretically, paintings are structurally incapable of the change required to sustain such an unfolding.
In the past, philosophers have confronted this puzzle by explaining the experience of emotional content in spatial terms. However, this reductionist view misses something intriguing about the phenomenon that is both informative regarding how we see pictures, and potentially useful to research into our personal recollections and dreams.
For example, Julian Barnes, in his celebrated book 'Keeping an Eye Open', offers a remark on Howard Hodgkin’s paintings that both captures and deepens our appreciative experience:
“H.H.’s paintings are not narratives. Mostly, they are memories. But it is not the case of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Rather, it is emotion recollected in intensity.”
While the philosopher may find remarks like this deepen their engagement with the work, they can only shrug when asked what, exactly, Barnes means.
Recent work in the psychology of dreaming and the philosophy of memory is now bringing insights that can improve our understanding of time’s role in painting, and give voice to aspects of our experience of pictures that otherwise remain baffling.
- Aspects of this new research has recently been presented at the British Society of Aesthetics in Oxford, and will feature in my talk at the Mind, Art, Knowledge conference in Brussels in June 2026, and at The National Gallery in London later this year.
NOVO, review
Vanessa Brassey
Performed at The Place 2–3 June 2026 17 Duke’s Road LondonWC1H 9PY (020) 7121 1100 info@theplace.org.uk
Becoming a mother is one of the most impactful experiences in a woman’s life, involving a profound shift in identity. The transformation involves, but is not limited to, a revised sense of the reality of value; biological change; relationship realignment and prioritisation; and, for most, the greatest challenge to some earlier vision of professional career. The change leaves many gasping in wordless confusion. Emotions are amplified, clashing, confusing, and uncontrollable. Within this storm the ship of Theseus that is you tries to find balance in a world upturned. Then suddenly,
Clap.
The storm is broken with a sound. And then again.
Clap. Clap.
Around you, chatting heads turn toward the sound. The crowd, now silent, is paying attention.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Somehow, this crowd is now a community. Pulled into the orbit of the slim, tiny, but powerful figure clapping slowly, steadily, confidently, soothingly, in the middle. We clap too. Acknowledging us with eye contact, the figure weaves between us and then leads us from this place into the room where, in tandem with a tender solo performance from the cello, she will express an emotion approximated in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “hubilance”.
Sivan Rubinstein’s NOVO, performed at The Place, upturns everything I ever knew about dance performance. It begins by reversing the clap from end to start. Over the hour we spend together, (and this is how the dance feels, like a togetherness), Sivan’s body moves as if through a liquid atmosphere of light and music. NOVO is a solo dance work rooted in pregnancy, birth, and maternal transformation, but it is also something broader: an interdisciplinary performance about embodiment, separation, dependence, rupture and return.
A vessel navigating the bliss and trauma of pregnancy, the euphoria and grief of birth, Sivan represents the rupture in the oneness between mother and baby, and the bewildering result of two new persons: mother and child. This dance, this one, is about her second pregnancy, and it occurs to me that this articulation of the uniqueness of motherhood, the distinction of experience from child to child, is new to me. I am sitting with my second daughter, and I find myself touching her arm lightly.
What makes NOVO so powerful is that it does not merely illustrate motherhood; it choreographs the instability of becoming a mother. Much of the movement is small before it is expansive: hands gathering and releasing, the torso folding and opening, weight dropping through the feet before the body seems to be pulled upwards again. There are moments of stillness that feel less like pauses than like pressure building inside the body. The movement seems at times to come from breath, at times from memory, and at times from some deeper animal knowledge of what the body has endured.
The staging is minimal: diaphanous fabrics that amplify the shadows and movement, foliage connecting to the roots of Sivan’s feet. Liran Donin on the double bass with his perfectly appointed score, Xenia Aidonopoulou’s dramaturgy, Zoé Ritchie’s lighting, Alina Dheere’s botanical set design and Zi Kim’s costume design all support the sense that the body is being held between fragility, ritual and transformation. There is a clear stylistic line here between NOVO and Sivan’s earlier production MAPS, about movement without borders, and, notably, a clear methodological approach. MAPS, which I was introduced to through philosopher Dr Sarah Fine of Cambridge, was based on serious research and deep collaboration. Similarly, NOVO has maintained that collaboration with Dr Sarah Fine and broadened it to include Dr Margarida Cardoso Moreira of the Francis Crick Institute. These are not the only collaborations that have fed the performance and been fed by it, and that shared generative process is evident in the choreographic style. The day after, I found myself reading up on the philosophy of pregnancy from Professor Elselijn Kingma. In other words, it’s dance that get’s you thinking.
Despite the primitive and essential fact of pregnancy and birth, one may still struggle to find reflections of what it is like to undergo it in art. NOVO joins some notable exceptions, from traditional painters like Mary Cassatt to the spoken word poet, Hollie McNish, performing her mantra “Megatron”. Even John Koenig’s noble attempt to offer us a word, “hubilance”, risks over-romanticising. What of the primal scream? The visceral, bloody, screaming, tortuous pleasures and pains for the mother? Well, here it is in all its beauty.
I first saw NOVO at an earlier stage of development, and even then I left the performance choked — because, of course, I am British and I can’t just let go in the room — by the electric shock that watching this can be. The kaleidoscope of thoughts that it provoked. What it is to be a mother. The sustenance that art can offer to counter the fragility of the body and the mind during these vulnerable phases. The sense of longing one always has for the part of oneself that has left the womb. How we disappear in these phases, only to reappear in a form that can take us by surprise.
Although NOVO is grounded in pregnancy and birth, it is not only for those who have given birth. It is for anyone interested in how bodies carry change before language can catch up. When the lights came on, my daughter said, “Oh, I’ve never felt anything like that.”
Take your daughters, and watch it with them.
NOVO
Sivan Rubinstein
Sivan Rubinstein: Choreographer
Liran Donin: Double Bass, Composer
Xenia Aidonopoulou: Dramaturg
Zoé Ritchie: Lighting Designer and Production Manager
Alina Dheere: Botanical Set Design
Zi Kim: Costume Designer
Lou Moria: Research & Development Collaborator
Masako Matsushita: Research & Development Collaborator
Lydia Walker: Understudy
Treacle Holasz: Producer
Zoë Grain: Assistant Producer
Thea Carter: Assistant Producer
Upright Fools: Marketing & Digital Content Support
Siân Gilling: Social Media Coordinator
Ricardo Reverón Blanco: Creative Consultant and Exhibition Co-curator
Yasiel Campos: Exhibition Designer
Maya Cohen: Graphic Designer
Jurga Ramonaite: Photographer
'Is this the right mode for an argument?'
Talk- Mind Art Knowledge Symposium, Brussels
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
15th -17th June 2026, KVAB - Rubensauditorium
Philosophy has traditionally advanced through words and formal logic. But in this ‘age of the image’, can or should arguments be made cinematically, and if so, when might this be preferable? A familiar criticism is that arguments in this mode are oversimplified and ambiguous. But does this confuse philosophy as entertainment with philosophy as argument? A current BSA-funded project explores these questions by combining novel philosophical research, basic video-making practices, and genuine curiosity, all held together by an attitude of ‘loving attention’, following Murdoch, to test how moving image can improve and communicate philosophical insight.
Philosophy on Film is generously funded by a BSA Small Grant Award.
'Paintings at Time Machines'
Magazine Essay & Talk- Frieze Members & Perediza Connect
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
published for an event at Shoreditch Arts Club April 17 2026
This talk explores a simple but surprising idea: still paintings are one of the richest human technologies for helping us reflect on our experience of time. Drawing on both philosophy and artistic practice, I look at three ways paintings engage with time: a) they are records of our different conceptions of time b) they raise intriguing puzzles about how we see movement, c) they can impact on the rate at which time seems to pass for us. The talk ends by connecting this last insight to contemporary life. In an age dominated by fast, fragmentary digital media that compress and erode our sense of time, painting offers a striking counter-experience: it slows perception, deepens attention, and, in a very real sense, gives time back to the viewer. By bringing together philosophical ideas about “chronoception” (our perception of time) with reflections from my own journey from philosophy into painting, Pictures as time machines offers an accessible and thought-provoking exploration of why savouring paintings remains uniquely powerful today.
'Dreaming in Candlelight: A Journey Through Time and Imagination'
Programme Essay- Shakespeare's Globe, A Midsummer Nights Dream
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
Imagine this: firelight flickers in a deep cave, crackling and glinting. On the wall above, a red-ochre bison seems to stir, its flank rippling and its limbs appearing to twitch in the shifting glow. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors made these paintings and experimented with bringing them to life. Even then, people wanted to tell stories, and every story depends on change.
For a scene to become a story, something must happen; one thing leads to another, and feeling follows action. Even the oldest tales can be retold so that whom we blame or applaud for the way things turn out can be revised. So, while a single image can be beautiful to look at, it takes a story to move us. This might be why our ancestors found ways to make still pictures move: they wanted to move our hearts.
Tonight, in candlelight at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, we too will be moved. The glowing actors will invite us to shift our perspective from one character to another. With each shift, we see a little more of the story unfold...
(full article available by request).
“The Moving Life of Still Images”
Talk- London Aesthetics Forum
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
22nd January 2026, 16:30-18:30 Senate House, Room 264.
A familiar thought in analytic philosophy is that still pictures are frozen: static images without temporal depth, incapable of anything like the unfolding we find in film, animation, music, or narrative art. On this picture of pictures, temporality enters pictorial representation only with the advent of moving-image technologies. But this assumption is untenable. From Palaeolithic bisons flickering in firelight, to the staged simultaneities of history painting, to the introspections of a Rothko, pictures organise, compress, dilate, and direct temporal experience in ways that standard theories cannot accommodate. In the talk, I’ll suggest that the temporality of pictures is not a defect to be corrected by animation but a constitutive feature of how images mean. Static images generate their own forms of temporal orientation, inviting the viewer into fields of anticipation, memory, and imaginative projection. I will trace several of these modes across different kinds of pictures and consider what follows for broader debates in aesthetics.
Postdoctoral Project
'Time for Beauty'
BSA Fellowship 2022-3
I am thrilled to have been awarded the BSA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2022-3. My project will be to explore the poorly defined concept of time-based aesthetic properties in (still) pictures, which I claim, helps to explain the representation and the expression of sophisticated emotions, such as regret, nostalgia, and euphoria. This challenges a longstanding assumption that expressiveness in a picture (and other aesthetic properties) depends solely on spatial extension - a curve here or a line there – while musical expressiveness depends on temporal properties namely, rhythm, melody, and cadence. However, given that sophisticated emotions such as nostalgia point to the past, it seems that the expressive qualities of at least some (such as nostalgic) pictures are interestingly time based.
PhD Thesis
'What Makes A Painting Sad?'
2020, awarding institution King's College, London.
Here are two claims to be examined in detail in this thesis. The first claim is that whenever we see pictorial content, what we see is mediated by a pictorial perspective. The second claim is that adequately seeing expressive content in paintings mandates imagining a persona occupying the pictorial perspective. In this thesis, I develop an argument to show how these two claims weave together to explain what makes a painting sad.
My thesis, which concerns seeing emotions in paintings, appeals to considerations about perspective-taking that are also relevant to seeing emotions in faces. I challenge the widely held view that ‘emotion’ refers to a state, ‘expression’ to the dynamic effect of that state, and ‘artistic expressiveness’ to the mere presentation of outward characteristics associated with the state. I show how this mistaken way of understanding what expression is, is put to work by theorists to explain how paintings can be expressive while failing to be expressions proper or failing to emanate from the kind of thing that can undergo an emotion. My work draws on a range of foundational issues in philosophy of perception and the philosophy of art to provide an account that corrects a common misconception about how we directly and immediately see emotions. I apply this account to a productive examination of the painterly case.
My proposal is that the phenomenon of expression is explained by invoking a constitutive persona theory. Viewers must or do see the picture from a persona’s emotional perspective. This is what we mean when we call a painting sad and expression cannot get going without it. The arguments in this thesis aim at establishing this conclusion.
