My work is driven by a curiosity into the investigation of mind thru art. None of us can avoid thoughts, but through awareness of our pitfalls, beauty, strengths and weaknesses we can open windows into the mind. The core of my contemplative art practice is to visually embody the blind spots as a result of our thoughts. I am interested in the study of how the mind works as a means of gaining insight, how we communicate, how we create identity through form, emotions and consciousness, and how we hide in that creation. Essentially this work is about all of us and the empty, clear and unconditional nature of mind we all have. When we know the nature of our mind we will know the nature of our world.
To express this I attempt to create a reflective experience of our habitual patterns with titles pointing to the possibility of cutting thru these patterns to mind’s clear nature as a way of connecting to our shared common experience. Each piece moves towards a different way of sharing discovery. There is control without control, a puzzling together. The paper has an inherent living quality. Because of how I treat the paper it takes on added causes and conditions and accelerated impermanence. The paper will age, become fragile, be affected by light yet will remain as those things we search for and cherish possibly in the attic or basement, an archeological site or a memory, much like in our lives. Touched in any way there’s a response; a fingerprint, wrinkle, rip, drip or tear, which becomes texture, language, figure and ground. A kind of non-dullness It’s ordinary inherent quality is special.
How we relate with our minds is a social engagement as well as a personal one. This piece expresses a direct intimate connection between how the disregard for the earth as a reflection of mind also reflects back into all of us in a personal way. Mind serves as the ground for all experience. When we indulge in our suffering we poison the earth and so poison each other.
Out habitual patterns of passion, aggression and ignorance like roots of a tree that reach deep into the earth, reach deep into our minds sustaining a false security of who we think we are. By engaging in these patterns mind’s true nature is obscured.
Everything begins as thought then appears to manifest as a reality, like a moon reflecting on water, it appears yet is empty.
Artwork by Hildy Maze. Featured image: as the earth is poisoned so am I, oil mixed media on canvas, 72 x 84”, 2008.