About Zangmo Alexander
About Zangmo Alexander
About Zangmo Alexander
ZANGMO ALEXANDER
Visual Artist, Mindful Creativity Mentor, Art Tutor
044 (0)1379 897393
Mindful Creativity Art Projects
How can creative activity support self awareness, compassion, loving-kindness, healing and well-being? For 16 years I have been evolving a series of autobiographical, contemplative, long-term art projects inspired by mindful awareness meditation.
Digital drawing and text memoir by Zangmo Alexander
Digital drawing and text memoir by Zangmo Alexander
Digital Drawing by Zangmo Alexander
Digital drawing and text memoir by Zangmo Alexander
Story Lines
Layers of collage, text from years of journals, asemic writing, wax and mixed media contemplating how social conditioning creates layers of habitual story lines and deeply held beliefs constituting my world view and notions of what is real.
Water based media on paper, poem by Geri DeLuca
Water colour, gouache, acrylic on paper by Zangmo Alexander
Water based mixed media contemplative art on paper by Zangmo Alexander
Water based media on paper, poem by Geri DeLuca
Mindweathersong
Mindweathersong is a series of collaborative diaries made in varying situations. Pictured here is the lockdown diary created with US author Geraldine DeLuca in 2020. It explores mindfulness of sensations, emotions, thoughts and feelings as they arise, pass and dissolve like weather in the sky-like space of open awareness.
Performative photography by Zangmo Alexander
Performative photography by Zangmo Alexander
Woman of a Certain Age
performance and digital photography
A contemplation on impermanence, grasping at my constantly changing body as a solid, reified "me".
Collaboration between Zangmo Alexander and Dr Pema Clark
Collaboration between Zangmo Alexander and Dr Pema Clark
Collaboration between Zangmo Alexander and Dr Pema Clark
Collaboration between Zangmo Alexander and Dr Pema Clark
Photography by Robert Eke
The Stripper
collaborative combined arts
Collaboration with Pema Clark PhD, who devised this one-hour play based on my life, written journals and visual art. It explores the journey from being a stripper in my twenties to training in peeling away layers of delusion through meditation in later life.
Performed at the University of East Anglia, UK in front of a paying audience.
Image and Text on Family Album by Zangmo Alexander
Image and Text on Family Album by Zangmo Alexander
Image and Text on Family Album by Zangmo Alexander
Image and Text on Family Album by Zangmo Alexander
Altered Family Album
appropriated book
My grandfather's cash book family photo album to which I added the yogic song Eight Things to Remember by the great Tibetan Buddhist yogi Milarepa.
This alteration turned an ordinary family photo album into an object for contemplation on impermanence.
Letter to My Mum
video
I was an ordained Buddhist nun for seven years before returning to lay life. Before ordaining, my Jewish mum asked me why I wanted to be a Buddhist nun, so in reply I made a short video sharing my disillusionment, questioning the wisdom of relying on materialism for any lasting peace and happiness.
Photograph
Photograph
Photograph
Photograph
Embodied Consciousness
Photography
This body and everything else I experience seem like a dream: I am aware of experiencing and it can also seem not solid. What is reality?
I am beginning to use photography to playfully explore my perceptions of embodiment in time and timelessness.
This involves being as aware and honest as I am able about perceptions of sensations, thoughts and feelings while also experimenting with how they can be made visible through photography.
Analogue photo, performance still, by Zangmo Alexander
Analogue photo, performance still, by Zangmo Alexander
Analogue photo, performance still, by Zangmo Alexander
Self and Identity
combined arts
Who are we? How do we build our identity and sense of self around socially conditioned beliefs, story lines, opinions, fixations and preconceptions?
How much of this is real, permanent and independent of anything else?
How does this social conditioning cause us suffering? How can we increase our wisdom and compassion?
Here Not Here
Mixed media drawing and painting
The illusion of an independent, impermanent self and concrete phenomena are experienced, yet are unfindable when we investigate what they really are through contemplation and meditation. The process of making art is a support for exploring this.
Unique silver halide luminogram by Zangmo Alexander
Unique silver halide luminogram by Zangmo Alexander
Unique silver halide luminogram by Zangmo Alexander
Unique silver halide luminogram by Zangmo Alexander
Tell Me What You Are
Camera-less analogue luminograms
The subject is the mind of the viewer who completes the artworks through associations of concepts, thoughts, labels, ideas, beliefs, opinions, and story lines. What do we think these images are of? What are we thinking and feeling when looking at the images?
Stillness and Movement
mixed media painting
Our mind can be still and it can be moving. How do these paintings reflect stillness and movement in our minds?
Graphite drawing on paper by Zangmo Alexander
Graphite drawing on paper by Zangmo Alexander
Charcoal on paper by zangmo Alexander
Graphite drawing on paper by Zangmo Alexander
Drawing As Meditation
graphite on paper
Open awareness meditation as the starting point and process from which to draw.
Vessel
Embodied consciousness
Water based media art and meditation sketchbook study by Zangmo Alexander
Water based media art and meditation sketchbook study by Zangmo Alexander
In Between
Everything seems so solid, yet constantly moving, in a fluid state of transformative flux. Is there anything which is unchanging? Are things really what they appear to be? How do we find it?