Excavations: recap of aims
Excavations is an autobiographical contemplation on how conditioned mind grasps at experience such as perception, memory, conditioning and self as solid.
Intentions and proposed deliverables:
Four, wall hung, mixed media art works on panel incorporating thick, textured layers of pigment, plaster, wax, oil paint, collage, words, drawn elements, photomontage, combined with opaque, transparent, scraped and dug out layers to reveal luminous, fine elements and space within
Experimental sketchbooks and studies
Photographic records
Visual and written documentation for developing into essays, articles, publications, talks, resource book, artist’s monograph, workshops, exhibition, blog, website
Context
Our current social system is set up to ensure we are conditioned towards having something concrete to hold onto for security, safety, success, status, comfort, love, self esteem and so on. If seen for what it is, some of this is useful. Other aspects cause and even deepen the sufferings such as greed, anger, envy, pride, fear and ignorance.
We all get caught up creating and grasping at conditioned, habitual story lines, believing thoughts and emotions to be facts, rather than fluid experiences arising, remaining and dissolving in the vast space of awareness, like weather arising and passing in space. Identifying, naming and deconstructing personal story lines can help us to see them as less solid, which may dissolve barriers, opening the mind to the peace, love and joy of vast, timeless, awareness.
In meditation, we do a lot of psychological excavation using awareness to discover the useful parts of our social learning process while letting go of what is not beneficial for increasing wisdom and compassion.
Development of Excavations Project
Story Lines
Between October 2019 to January 2020, as I sorted through 40 years of art work and journals, I inquired deeply into what the original aims of the Awakening Through Creativity project and in particular the Excavations project really meant for me as a personal, experiential practice, eventually arriving at the theme of Story Lines. This period of personal questioning and conceptual inquiry contributed to triggering the rather intense psychological transition described in the Personal Process blog.
Why Story Lines?
Story Lines aims to investigate Monkey Mind, the distracted, conditioned, habitual thought processes bouncing around in the mind uncontrollably day and night, causing much inner disruption, chaos, confusion and suffering. It's the human condition, a good place to start.
Making art experimenting with different ways of picturing Story Lines as they arise, remain and dissolve can help loosen up my identification with them. When not seen as solid, Story Lines are fluid, flexible, interdependent energy movements, like songs blown by the winds of karma in a beautiful dance of creation. The more open I can be, the less stuck I am in identifying with limited conditioning, when embodiment becomes a creative playground, a crucible for the exploration of experience.
Which personal meditation practices will inform Story Lines?
Observing my own conditioned experience, including the ever changing arising, remaining and dissolving of storylines that I create through grasping, aversion and confusion
Learning to recognise and rest in the unchanging, timeless awareness that knows and reflects conditioned experience but is not subject to it. For further details see this link
Approaching Story Lines as a creative practice
I realised I am not interested in clever, conceptual art, but in making art that feels authentic, honest, visceral, raw and simple, that points to timeless essence within suffering.
Discovering authenticity, simplicity and humility working in the moment with what arises in Dharma practice and in art practice from what Trungpa Rinpoche called Square Zero is a meditation-in-action. Noticing story lines as they occur, neither following nor rejecting them, just aware of their dance, allowing a recognition and dissolving of the grasping. Each piece pictures mind in some way, makes mind visible. By mind I mean all sensory, conceptual, emotional, memory, self, spiritual, awareness, ie everything experienced in the mirror of awareness.
Story Lines: the four wall hung art works
I clarified the general theme each of the four wall-hung deliverables would take for the Story Lines project. These themes are still works-in-progress:
Monkey Mind: 4ft x 3ft mixed media panel. A visual summary of the whole theatre of grasping, clinging, thoughts, feelings, memories, as an uncontrollable, confusing display withing the mirror of awareness in my own experience. It's like a shamatha practice, observing mind weather in general, without any investigation
Objects of Attachment: begins to investigate monkey mind, observing perception of specific phenomena I go for refuge to as a source of permanent happiness. With the emphasis on objects of the five senses perception, there will also be the beginning of a sixth consciousness, conceptual naming of how these are objects of refuge, hopefully done poetically. This may be done as drawings or photomontage, not sure yet. Objects of Attachment will be informed by my experience of the 8 Worldly Concerns: (1) hope for happiness and fear of suffering (2) hope for fame and fear of insignificance (3) hope for praise and fear of blame (4) hope for gain and fear of loss; - basically attachment and aversion (ref: https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Eight_worldly_preoccupations)
Labels: with focus on 6th consciousness conceptual and emotional experience, ie emphasis on labels in my mind rather than physical objects named in the second piece. Using actual labels as major part of the work to investigate how my beliefs, opinions, emotions etc are grasped at as solid, real, unchanging, ie how mind creates this world.
Nothing to See With Conceptual Mind: 90cm x 90cm mixed media canvas, already completed.
Story Lines: exploratory studies, experiments
For a month I explored open-endedly in sketchbooks, on paper, canvas and wood panel with mixed media, methods, processes and ideas to see what emerges organically for further development into the four wall-hung pieces.
Above and below: sketchbook studies investigating a new range of mixed media to use in larger works. This included fire ash, museum quality watercolour pencils, wood glue, marble dust. Texture for me evokes different mind states: dark grittiness feels different from smooth, sensuous, white tile adhesive. When combined with asemic writing, for me the materiality seems to create a 'mind atmosphere', a mood, with space and depth.
Above: experiments with gesture, asemic writing, luminosity, interiority/exteriority using oils
Above and below: more experiments with new mixed media
This became the foundational idea for Monkey Mind. Incorporating transfer lettering, tracing paper, Japanese paper, paper towels, cold wax, oil paint, PVA glue, crayon, this study was constructed in thick layers on a cradled panel and hacked into when dry to reveal lower layers over a period of a year. I was just following intuition, not-knowing where it was going. The trigger for adding the transfer lettering was due to participating in an exhibition called ‘Transference’ in which work had to include transfer lettering. I had no idea why I was drawn to this at the time, other than just following a quiet voice and warm gut feeling which works well for authentic creative practice (and life in general).
Reflection: Paint, colour and tone give a sense of a presence behind and beyond the arrow movement, textures and layers giving me a sense of timeless presence there, whatever is happening. The arrows take my mind in different directions, like monkey mind darting here and there. I am looking at image now, yet this is evoking different speeds of movement of the mind, associations of monkey mind, timeless presence, impermanence, simultaneity of different perceptions of time, remembering, presence
Layers/textures: Connote layers of mind and memory, changing but not as fast as darting arrows, are more about a longer stretch of time. There is also wabi-sabi association.
Ultramarine pigment, so beloved by Yves Klein, I first used in 1990. For me ultramarine pigment has the vastness of potent, primordial space, which I find takes me to a place beyond words, beyond space and time. I have just begun working on the 3ft x 4ft cradled wooden panel for Monkey Mind, which is heavy before even adding all the mixed media I intend to use. When using layers of mixed media, canvas is not an option because it expands and contracts, causing cracking of the mixed media. Drawing with mixed media to introduce movement, energy, becoming, dissolving. Energy on the edge of asemic writing becoming words, forms, solidifying then dissolving. Relationship between interiority and exteriority appearing, yet they are one or unfindable. Wanting to avoid any landscape picture-of-something referencing, yet a sense of space, place, presence with space being a symbol for space of mind. Many layers will be added to this.
Above and below: studies experimenting with horizontal lines as markers for mind and time. I very much respond to the later grid paintings of Agnes Martin, who herself was highly spiritual, influenced by Buddhist teachings and spoke at length about practising as an artist. These studies were interesting experiments in marking thoughts and distractions but I feel they are very embryonic and would have to be worked in a different way.
Above: sketchbook experiments picturing mind that cannot find a storyline to hold onto, no reference
Monkey Mind: developing the work
Following making the study, Excavations 1, it became clear how seemingly unrelated elements of mixed media painting I had been experimenting with over many years were beginning to be synthesised as a visual language. In the cradled 4ft x 3ft mixed media Monkey Mind, I aim to bring these elements together further:
Energy, movement through mark, line. In this work, the energy is all over the place, not one direction but many directions. A viewer commented that she could not find anything to focus on, nothing led anywhere and that she ended up back with herself and being aware.
Stillness, goes together with movement
Luminosity, clarity, radiance, mainly through colour and tone, mainly white and yellow
Texture and tone for atmosphere and mood, sgraffito, digging, gauging, scraping, hacking, concealing, revealing, tearing
Space, the container for everything, blue, overlapping, layers
Text, letters, words, symbols, labels, asemic writing, narrative, storylines
Sense of interior and exterior as one
Presence within everything going on
Palimpsest layers, opacity, transparency, depth
Elemental solidity, fluidity, airiness, warmth, spaciousness
Experience, events arising - becoming - dissolving - empty gap
Interconnectedness, interdependence
Liminality, in-between, unfindability, everything as threshold
Media
Transfer lettering, rubber stamps, labels, collage text, asemic writing
Cold wax
Oil paint
Pigment
Pencil
Collage
Watercolour
Monoprint
Oil pastels and museum quality watercolour pencils
Fire ash
Marble dust
Tile adhesive
Soot
Very excited as I now have a new way forward!
Below: ongoing development of a 4ft x 3ft mixed media, layered panel
The intention is to add and remove layers as a palimpsest. Each layer is a process of meditation documenting and expressing story lines in my mind at the time the marks were made. The work is developed over months, as layers may need to dry in between applications of collage, paint, wax and so on.
Below: Poem by Geraldine deLuca chopped up and added to the panel. More layers created using collage of extremely fine Japanese translucent paper which has a quality of skin. transparency, translucency are beginning to emerge as palimpsest now. It is beginning to have a life of its own. I am just the place where it happens.
March 2020: Coronavirus and Story Lines - enter the wild card
Personal response to the pandemic
Initially I tried 'business as usual' when the coronavirus pandemic hit the charts in February-March 2020. But as artists are like sponges, it was not possible to be this dissociated from the suffering around me and the impact of self isolation as an older person prone to chest infections.
Adjusting both psychologically and in practical ways took a month. Needing funds to pay for help in the house, garden and physiotherapy to release time and energy for continuing this project, I spent another two weeks applying for an Arts Council England Emergency Response Grant. So 6 weeks disruption in total. The Arts Council application was successful, so I can now continue this project with the proviso that I also spend time thinking and planning for sustainable ways forward with my art practice. I have found a gardener and physiotherapist, but finding a cleaner is more challenging.
Impact of pandemic on art and meditation practice
Initially maintaining presence, awareness and compassion for both myself and others while in the eye of the storm was an exhausting, tiring, rollercoaster. But that's how it was. Looking back ten weeks later, I am aware there are both negative and positive aspects in my own experience of this pandemic, most of which can feed art and meditation practice and this project.
These include:
Positive Impact
My spiritual teacher Mingyur Rinpoche has been giving weekly teachings online, drawing thousands of viewers. This has been an inspiring, stabilising blessing.
I live in semi-retreat anyway, but as much of the world has been doing this, I have felt more part of what is going on. More social interaction than usual as we all Zoom. Getting into organic veggie growing as mindful exercise and interaction with nature. More contact with neighbours as we support each other: they deliver my food, I give them veggie plants. Still no car, can't afford it, do I really need one?
Pollution has plummeted, benefiting the environment
Fewer wars, more peaceful
Negative or positive impact? A spiritual and art practice opportunity?
Navigating notions of negative (ie aversion) and positive (grasping) or neutral (sometimes confusion) are core practices in Tibetan Buddhism. Everything is an opportunity for spiritual practice; it's not about sitting on the cushion blissing out.
I became aware of how the this intense situation unearthed turbulent mind weather of my repressed and unconscious story lines, identified with as not just beliefs, but solidified as facts causing suffering. While not pleasant, it would have taken longer in ordinary retreat to become so sharply aware of these more subtle internal dynamics.
Coronavirus Diary as part of Story Lines project
Meaty stuff, scary yet workable with. How? I realised this was a wonderful opportunity for the Story Lines project, as it could now be situated within the framework or context of the pandemic, giving it an added, very tangible dimension.
How to do this? Awareness/emptiness/compassion practices. I began to feel a daily diary would be a good starting point, but didn't want it to be a self-absorbed toxic outpouring. It had to be bigger than that. This led to a more socially engaged Coronavirus Diary collaboration with Geraldine deLuca, which is still ongoing.
Developing and presenting Coronavirus Diary
To see the actual Coronavirus Diary images on this website, please go to https://alexanderzangmo.wixsite.com/awakening-creativity/post/coronavirus-diary
Reflection
The diary itself has images that are made within 5 minutes each, so they are not sustained works individually. They are more like a snapshot study of two individuals over a period of time.
It can be presented 'as is', in various formats including: 1. A hard copy book: being designed 2. Online flip book being designed: https://www.zangmoalexander.com/coronavirus-diary 3. Video montage: want to do, but very time consuming
There are many images and ideas within the diary ripe for developing into wall-hung pieces.
Meta-Reflection on development of project
Coronavirus Diary will develop over several months parallel with the other projects.
Development of Story Lines, What Remains and Here-Not-Here I now see will develop concurrently, in a lateral, rather than linear, way.
Below: early stage studies relating to Self and Identity using heads as a tangible way in for an audience. This is a pin-up for considering development and approaches to curating and presenting the aspect of Dukka, grasping and suffering, the unhealthy sense of the 'small' self, ego-grasping. Maybe an evolution from dense form to a formlessness.......?
Below: thin Japanese paper resting on the large 4ft x 3ft panel being worked on earlier. It is gradually becoming the textual and textural palimpsest that I wanted. It is taking forever to work on as each layer has to dry before adding the next layer. This is another reason for working on projects concurrently.
Below: early stage study on elements, flow flow of thoughts, energy movement
Below: further early stage energy studies relating to the theme of 'Vessel', embodiment and essence
