Contemplative Art Projects

A series of long-term art projects inspired by mindful awareness meditation and contemplation practice 

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.

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.

Documentation of the diary with guidelines for doing it yourself are being developed into a book, ready for publication.

Woman of a Certain Age
performance and digital photography

A contemplation on impermanence, grasping at my constantly changing body as a solid, reified "me".

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.

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Performed at the University of East Anglia, UK in front of a paying audience. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

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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.

Tell Me What You Are
Camera-less, lens-free analogue luminograms created in a darkroom.

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? 

Drawing As Meditation
graphite on paper

Open awareness meditation as the starting point and process from which to draw.

Vessel

Embodied consciousness

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?