Work: EMPTINESS
Medium: Plaster & steel armatures.
Location: Canberra AUS.
Date: 2017
Details:
"What we think is real - our thoughts and feelings about people and things - exists by merely labelling by the mind...those able to attain knowledge of a state of emptiness are able to realise that their thoughts are merely illusions from the labelling of the mind." (Dalai Lama)
"...it has to do with issues that lie beneath the material, with fact that materials are there to make something else possible... the things that are available, or the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material ... the practice of true making occurs only when the material and the non-material tangentially touch ... The sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space." (Homi K. Bhabha)
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A glimpse at the philosophical beliefs within Mahayana Buddhism through a deconstruction of the book A Philosophy of Emptiness by Gay Watson. The author references a number of thinkers and artists including Albert Camus, the Dalai Lama and the pre-eminent writer on the works of Anish Kapoor, Homi K. Bhabha. This project is an initial foray into plaster and sculptural forms and seeks to investigate the vessel and how line and negative space is able to convey a sense of weightlessness of what is otherwise a heavy object. The themes of this project falls in line with the artist's own durational meditation practice.
To paraphrase Watson:
Jean-Paul Sartre viewed the 'fundamental absurdity'w of all things and attempts to pierce the veil of perception.. Which leads to disgust and wonder.. His disgust and nausea increases in observing the mundane things in life and in qualities of objects including colour and form... until he is finally confronted with the pure thing stripped of language and definition; a moment akin to 'transcendence' in the pursuit of Emptiness through meditation; an experiential indifference, versus cerebral despondence.
In reality this mentality of crisis was shared by all the existentialists including Kirkegaard, Nietsche, Heidegger and Sarte... And his true character was one that valued friendship and nature - he was a champion of the ordinary... And, as with Jean Paul Sartre in the novel 'Nausea', was able to see through the ordinary and question the existence of the object; It's meaning and its tangibility.
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Quotes & Texts from A Philosophy of Emptiness by Gay Watson (UK: Reaktion, 2014).
Medium: Plaster & steel armatures.
Location: Canberra AUS.
Date: 2017
Details:
"What we think is real - our thoughts and feelings about people and things - exists by merely labelling by the mind...those able to attain knowledge of a state of emptiness are able to realise that their thoughts are merely illusions from the labelling of the mind." (Dalai Lama)
"...it has to do with issues that lie beneath the material, with fact that materials are there to make something else possible... the things that are available, or the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material ... the practice of true making occurs only when the material and the non-material tangentially touch ... The sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space." (Homi K. Bhabha)
--
A glimpse at the philosophical beliefs within Mahayana Buddhism through a deconstruction of the book A Philosophy of Emptiness by Gay Watson. The author references a number of thinkers and artists including Albert Camus, the Dalai Lama and the pre-eminent writer on the works of Anish Kapoor, Homi K. Bhabha. This project is an initial foray into plaster and sculptural forms and seeks to investigate the vessel and how line and negative space is able to convey a sense of weightlessness of what is otherwise a heavy object. The themes of this project falls in line with the artist's own durational meditation practice.
To paraphrase Watson:
Jean-Paul Sartre viewed the 'fundamental absurdity'w of all things and attempts to pierce the veil of perception.. Which leads to disgust and wonder.. His disgust and nausea increases in observing the mundane things in life and in qualities of objects including colour and form... until he is finally confronted with the pure thing stripped of language and definition; a moment akin to 'transcendence' in the pursuit of Emptiness through meditation; an experiential indifference, versus cerebral despondence.
In reality this mentality of crisis was shared by all the existentialists including Kirkegaard, Nietsche, Heidegger and Sarte... And his true character was one that valued friendship and nature - he was a champion of the ordinary... And, as with Jean Paul Sartre in the novel 'Nausea', was able to see through the ordinary and question the existence of the object; It's meaning and its tangibility.
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Quotes & Texts from A Philosophy of Emptiness by Gay Watson (UK: Reaktion, 2014).
