nen nen ju shin ki

Thought forms are the children of an earlier project, my final project in the first year of my art degree. Focussing on the idea of meditation: trying to still the crazed jabbering of monkey mind, find some spaces between the thoughts.

Thought following thought following thought – rattling by. That internal monologue of commentary, judgements, relentless parroting of worries… do you listen to the babble? Do you try to drown it out? Music, TV, incessant banter – some folk don’t keep it inside – they are a non-stop torrent of witterings.

It can be exhausting.

And fascinating.

nen1

This piece took shape as a 3 metre x 45 cm relief collage constructed from reclaimed bits and bobs, mostly painted paper, card, pins, tiny scraps of wood, wire, staples. These kinda things. The things and stuff that came to my mind as I was making it. Positioned in a corner it draws the viewer in so they become a part of the work, surrounded by the noise.

nen_l1

Complex trains of thought – interconnected and overlapping – are represented by the darkest and most detailed elements.

nen_r1

The process of meditation calming the mind from the persistent banter of thoughts by suspending this mental chatter from one moment to the next is represented by diminishing detail and lighter tones reducing to nothing in the centre.

I’d love to recreate this on an even bigger scale some day.

scrap-driven pages


Working in the way I do generates a lot of scraps and offcuts. There are days (most of them) when I have no idea where to begin or how the page will look. The scraps often decide this for me, and Day 33 is pure 100% scrap driven!


Along with the scraps I make there are scraps I save from the ‘outside world’ – labels, tickets, lists and quotes written on the backs of envelopes… these were the founding ingredients for day 34.

The quote that I made annoyingly illegible was from an unknown Sufi master: “May I overcome any bitterness that may have arisen because I was not up the magnitude of the pain I was entrused with”. Hearty food for thought.


Scraps make for textural interest too, in page 35 I used little torn rectangles to build up a layer of white on the blank white page, that’s where the linear forms began and the rest just happened!

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