About Zangmo Alexander
About Zangmo Alexander
About Zangmo Alexander
About Zangmo Alexander
ZANGMOALEXANDER
Visual Artist, Art and Meditation, Mindful Creativity Coach
Awakening Through
Creativity
A series of long-term projects exploring visual art
as a support for awareness meditation and contemplation.
While each project is a distinct body of work, mindful creativity links them as a whole.
Story Lines
A contemplation on how social conditioning creates layers of habitual story lines and deeply held beliefs constituting my world view.
Layers of collage, text from years of journals, asemic writing, wax and mixed media building materials support mindful awareness and insight into what arises in the mind and how it is held as real.
Zangmo Alexander
Geraldine DeLuca
Geraldine DeLuca
Zangmo Alexander
Mindweathersong
Collaborative Mixed Media Coronavirus Lockdown Diary Zangmo Alexander and Geraldine DeLuca
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".
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 performance, 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, lens-free analogue luminograms on silver halide photographic paper 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?
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.
Mixed media on paper
Mixed media multiple process image
Mixed media on paper
In Between
The universe is in interdependent fluid flux motion. Things appear solid, but are they?