Embodiment

I have the sense of being embodied awareness, that awareness is everywhere and that the body contains this awareness for the duration of a life.

These images are part of a series created over thirty years exploring my sense of embodiment

Self and Identity

How do we build our identity and sense of self around socially conditioned beliefs, story lines, opinions, fixations and preconceptions?
How does this social conditioning cause us suffering? How can we increase our wisdom and compassion? 

What Remains?

Mixed media artists books

What, if anything, remains when striving and straining and stressing and clinging collapse? 

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.

Mindweathersong

Mindweathersong is a collaborative diary created with Geraldine DeLuca during the UK and USA Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020.  It is based on 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.

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. 

Tell Me What You Are

camera-less analogue
photography

Camera-less, lens-free analogue luminograms on silver halide photographic paper created in a darkroom. Viewers complete the artworks through perception, projections and associations of concepts, thoughts, labels, ideas, beliefs, opinions, and storylines. What are we thinking and feeling when looking at the images? How real or true are they? How do they cause suffering? How do they benefit us?

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? 

Altered Family Album

appropriated book

​

A family photo album made from a cash book photo album made by my granddad. I added the yogic song Eight Things to Remember by the great yogi Milarepa, I turned the album into an object for contemplation on impermanence on something that would hit home more than just abstractly contemplating impermanence

​

Letter to My Mum

video 

​

I was an ordained Buddhist nun for seven years before returning to lay life. Before ordaining, my mum asked me why I wanted to be a 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. 

Drawing As Meditation

graphite on paper

​

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