at the Bluff Centre, Trecknow
I co-led this week with my good friend Vilokini, an MA printmaking student, for artists within our Buddhist tradition (the Triratna movement - http://thebuddhistcentre.com). There were 10 of us altogether in this beautiful guesthouse on a clifftop overlooking a stretch of the north Cornish coast.
Over the week I set out to explore:
1. how our art and meditation practices could influence one another
2. how I would respond visually to the environment
1. art and meditation
We began and ended each day with meditating together and also had a period of ritual puja at the end of each afternoon. We quite naturally fell into silence during the day, a time in which it was possible to be quite deeply focused on our art. In the evenings we shared what we were doing or watched art films.
Most of us noticed early on that meditation was having a positive effect on our art, making us more receptive to our surroundings and to creative ideas, but not necessarily the other way round! - minds were more distracted than usual by thoughts of the day's projects. However as the week wore on I found myself growing more spacious around these: they were after all just thoughts like any others and I could practise watching the thinking mind trying to seize hold of them, control the creative process.
Being aware of my body in meditation also made me realise that I was getting very driven in some of my artwork, creating stresses on my body that I was ignoring. This encouraged me to work in a gentler way.
It was moving to be connected with the others in letting our work flourish together.
2. my visual responses to the environment
I went out walking each day and built up a bank of photos to work from. I experimented with: collaging outlines of the cliffs and hills, and of marks in the sand left by the receding tide; relief printing of lichen shapes using sticky-back foam; closely packed linear scratchings marking my out-breaths. All on tracing paper.
The work I was most pleased with, however, and which I want to continue on my return, was inspired by Mira Schendel's Variants and the title of her work 'Little Nothings'. Walking back up the cliff track one morning I was drawn to the plant fragments in the hedgerow: decaying stems, dried remains of flowers and seedheads. Things that normally go unnoticed, that are passing out of existence. I made small (10 x 15cm) etched drawings of these on tracing paper and hung them vertically with transparent thread. They are hard to see, hardly there - 'almost nothings' - an expression of the Buddhist teaching of insubstantiality (that nothing has a fixed state of being). I felt in these I was giving expression visually to what I have learnt and absorbed in meditation.
I'm imagining hundreds of these hanging together, catching the light, in a way that people can move amongst them.
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