portfolio > ordinary vastness 2015 - 2016

Investigating the Mind thru Art


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.

For me oil on paper drawing and painting with collage is the most responsive material to the investigation of mind thru art. With the studio floor covered in pieces of painted paper, ripped, aged and often walked on for days or months in the process, the rhythm of art making is newly alive with unpredictability. This process determines the piece. There is both an active sense of design and circumstance, as well as accident and accumulation of everything discovered so far. Each piece pushes me towards a different way of sharing discovery. There is control without control, an instinctive puzzling together. The paper has an inherent living quality. Because of the handling or non-handling of the paper it takes on added causes and conditions and accelerated impermanence, the nature of things,in this case, the paper as it is. 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. Its ordinary insignificant quality becomes special. Touched in any way there's a response; a fingerprint, wrinkle, rip, drip or tear, which then becomes texture and language,traces of process and practice as echoes or footprints challenging our conditioned response to things worn,torn,old wrinkled or ripped as good or bad, acceptable or not acceptable; challenging our dualistic way of seeing the world. The images are also a continuation of looking at ourselves through sign and symbol and abstracted representation of how mind manifests, grasps, fixates and hides in the world it perceives. Both images and titles invite you to move beyond these boundaries into a space of speculation and one’s own mind. ~Hildy Maze

This passage excerpted from an essay on Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

“Our attitude and integrity as artists are very important. We need to encourage and nourish the notion that we are not going to yield to the neurotic world. Inch by inch, step-by-step, our effort should wake people up through the world of art rather than please everyone and go along with the current.” ~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Images and text ©copyright Hildy Maze