Meditation as Ignition is an ongoing series of works that explore the body and its response to practices that use ritual, deep focus and deliberate postures. Through yoga, writing, reading, stitching and sitting & walking meditations, I engage with ideas of silence, solitude, vulnerability and rescue, prompting dialogue on the transformative potential of these contemplative practices. My process is both intuitive and deliberate. Deliberate in that I choose the materials and actions that place emphasis on the physicality of my gestures in making and, in the final works the feeling, experiencing body is referenced. Intuitive in the way that the mark or stitch manifests in the piece.
Guiding this work is the poem Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda, which presents a call for silence and a suggestion that to break the momentum of our busy days, we must endeavor to be still:
‘If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves’. (excerpt)
Meditation as Ignition presents a portrait of solitude and contemplative practice as a pathway towards finding essential knowledge of the self.
Danielle Bleackley, 2015/16
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