Inner Suchness is an interactive installation that combines single-track digital video projection and augmented reality (AR). The artwork reveals multiple layers articulating self-awareness of movements from the inner world of an unfolding journey of daily contemplative practice. During the first Sydney lockdown in 2020, the artist conducted an autoethnography of her daily practice of Tonglen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation for compassion cultivation. Inner Suchness aims to embody and enact this deep first-person interrogation of experience through movement, light and interaction, generated through the metaphor of mandala offerings.
The performance uses internal and external gaze to construct, grow and offer outer and inner explorations of the mind in contemplation. One journeys with introspection in solitude but acts in relationship with the other. The work invites viewers to observe and participate by accessing another dimension through AR, conveying processes of lived experience of compassion cultivation – re/aligning, accepting, discovering, transforming and dissolving.
A mandala is a representation of a universe. Inner Suchness symbolises a process of returning to one's practice where one can observe the mind as a rich landscape of delusion and virtue, sensations of the body, abundance, suffering and enjoyments, friends, enemies and strangers. Without any sense of loss, one offers this collection, this jewelled mandala, to the great enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Public talk: "Confronting Fear: Samsara and Non-Duality in Art" | Presence of Mind
