All Categories - Jo Campbell - Artist and Therapist

May Creativity and Mindfulness Flow

6/9/2015

Wow, it's June already. May was a blur of activity mostly centred around a 10-day trip to Melbourne to run a mindfulness and creativity retreat with my gorgeous friends Tess, Juliet and Gitanjali. We're exploring ways to work together as a collective of women who combine creativity, mind/body work and transformative practices.

We ran our first public workshop with 16 participants, offering yoga, art therapy, playful+mindful drawing, and creative writing. The aim was to help women find a sense of ease within their creativity and life. People came away feeling inspired and energised - we hope they go out and create whatever their lives are asking of them.

I came home from the experience buzzing and spent the next 2 weeks thinking hard about where all this could go. This is an ongoing question (as it should be) and not least because I have so many different things I want to do with my life... Sound familiar anyone?

So, several sessions of playing with colourful post-it-notes later, I am getting a little clearer. I want to continue painting - this is because it keeps me centred in my practice, both the art practice and also the Zen practice. It helps me digest and make sense of the world around me. Yep, painting is my external digestive system; my gut!

Sometimes, this external gut of mine gets a little constipated.

Which brings me to workshops/retreats. Workshops and retreats are my way of emptying myself, getting unstuck, rediscovering flow, getting off my butt and creating something beyond my comfort zone, etc etc. I've always loved facilitating workshops and I want to get more and more experimental with them. So bring on Tess's idea of allowing the workshop to evolve from within the group - fully emergent and co-creative. In fact, bring on all the ideas you lovely ladies of the forest.

Here are some titles and tag-lines I've come up with for my corner of the collective:

- Creative Mojo Health-Spas
(the gentle laxative for creative constipation)

- Making your Mark retreats
(drawing deep to fully come alive)

- The Radical Art of Self-Acceptance
(creating transformation)

- Embracing your Life Creatively
(experience and express your enoughness)

- Mojo's on the Move
(creating clearer pictures of purpose, passion and priorities)

- Paper Scissors Porridge
(the humble art of creative transformation)

I'd love to hear your responses. Which words, ideas, themes, make you buzz? Which make you want to know more? Which make you want to grab a bag and go?

And to my sisters in Melbourne, what yummy dandies would you like to offer up? And how can we support each other and work together to make more of these events happen?

Where to Next?

4/29/2015

In the past few years I have focused on my painting as a place of Zen practice, a way of exploring and presenting a koan. This might sound a little esoteric, but actually it's as simple as exploring how to be a fully present human being.

My latest exhibition (Freeform at Kereru Gallery) touches on the calligraphic practice of mark-making. I lay down a line with all of me present. Artist Bill Gingles puts it another way: "I aim to get myself out of the way of the painting". Same thing. All of me present and out of the way!

This way of painting is something so different from my previous narrative style, wherein I tried to 'tell' the audience something. Now I leave the interpretation of my work to the audience and hope that at some level the painting can simply be an experience rather than an explanation. I leave the audience to respond to the painting in non-intellectual ways, that perhaps tap into feelings and states of being rather than developing particular ideas or issues. However, there are times when I yearn to get back to more issue-based work.

I deeply admire art that takes on an issue, explores it and expresses a view about it, or even better, encourages the viewer to investigate the issue themselves and find their own response or action. For some people this is not real art, but to me the definition of real art is in the process not the product. And if the process of exploring an issue is done creatively, poetically, openly and with a deep awareness, then that's good enough for me!

So I have completed preparations for the Kereru exhibition and also the Oxford Arts Centre show, and am having a short break while I explore how to combine the above two approaches to art making.

Where to Next is where I find myself... And What is Enough????

Getting going again!

3/17/2015

My husband has just one entry on the blog page of his website. It reads, 'I once had delusions that I would have time to write a blog".

I am feeling a little like that at the moment. It has been almost 2 years since I wrote this blog (OK, I published a post earlier today, but it doesn't count as it was written in draft back in 2013).

So, anyhow. Why did I stop writing blogs, apart from going through a spectacularly busy year with 5 exhibitions, doing up and selling a house, running a retreat and changing schools for my son?

In short, I was experiencing burnout at the time and that lead to a bout of depression. I mention this as I think our culture's ability to be open (and supportive) about mental health is a very important issue - and I want to remind anyone out there who is overdoing it to take a break!

Luckily, I am on the mend again and have had a couple of years of fewer exhibitions (about 2 a year - much more doable), lots of cycling and also a wonderful 6 month travelling stint with my kids and husband which took us to Australia, Indonesia, Nepal, France and the UK. I shall post something on this later....

So now I am back home and getting back into the studio. I have 2 exhibitions coming up, one in Kereru and another in Oxford Arts Centre. And I am also keen to get back into keeping a blog. It's important for me to reflect on my work and I hope it's useful to share some of those thoughts with anyone out there who might be interested in a similar form of art practice or who simply might want to know what is behind my work.

So, here is my intention: To write a blog entry at least once a month. Let's see how that goes...

Doors: Unhinged

3/17/2015

After much exploration, (and very little time to keep up with a blog), I finished my contribution to the
'Doors:Unhinged' show back in 2013. I chose to explore the Zen metaphor of the Gateless Barrier.

I made 3 large pieces for the show, each one a doorway. The first is an encaustic painting on an old rimu door, the second an empty space created by a frame of 20cm square encaustic paintings, and the third a large panel with a white doorway (on which the audience is invited to draw their body) framed by the following words:

"What do I stand for in all my imperfections, just as I am right here? Placing my body on this great body. Where do I stop and you begin? And will you gather with me here?
It's said, "If you cannot go through as you are, you cannot go through at all". How then should we go through? How should we enter this barrier, or any door for that matter?
Standing tall as myself, I walk into my life as each moment asks. With nothing missing. On this threshold of intimacy, where are the barriers now?"

These three pieces are my presentation of the Zen Koan 'Mu'.
Photos to come...

A Gateless Barrier

4/13/2013

My art practice is an attempt to blend meditation, the felt-sense and the visual.

To wake up!

I trust that coming back to this basic practice, of being present, of allowing what is, will lead into a more engaged or farther-reaching practice one day. Someone once said that art should break habits. I love that. There are so many; great big global habits and tiny little prickly habits, issues that affect us all.

For now, I have undertaken to be part of an exhibition about 'doors' at the Refinery Gallery in Nelson this August. We've been asked to interpret 'doors' in whichever way we choose. Straight away I thought of 'The Gateless Barrier', a way perhaps of describing 'awakening' in the Zen tradition. It suggests a form of doorway, an entry point of sorts. Although there is nothing to enter, and nowhere to go. Right there lie a habit or two.

Over there is the gateless barrier.
Each step towards it is a barrier. Each step I take.
Letting go the need to think it through and going through nonetheless, even when I am stuck.

I am struggling to find the starting point for this work. Where do you start when there is nowhere to go, nothing to step through? The stepping through is the gate. So for now, just taking a step in any direction is the right direction.

It brings to mind a passage from one of my children's favourite books,"Stumble trip, stumble trip, stumble trip. We can't go over it, We can't go under it, Oh No! We've got to go through it!"

So here's to stumbling and tripping... and to painting doors that lead right back home.

Rain Falls

12/5/2012

There is knowing what to do.
And then there is doing it.

There is also not knowing what to do.
And still there is doing it.

The rain just falls.
The plants are happy.
I have a childfree afternoon with deadline met.
A deep breathing out.

Mmmmmmm.

Doubting Paint

12/4/2012

Doubting every step of the way. What is this?

Doubting. It's opposite might be knowing. Being sure. Being certain. Being clear.

Am I so sure? Are knowing and being clear the same thing? Or might doubting and being clear more readily coexist?

As I put the paintbrush onto the canvas (in so many ways in life), do I put it down with clarity and knowing? Luckily not. With clarity and doubt? If I'm lucky.

Right at the very tip of the paintbrush, does it know in which direction the paint will go? Only by doing. Only by being. And even then, not. Wonderfully unclear. Yet the paint is. Luminously white, mysteriously black, and then somewhere in-between.

Do we know where the next breath will take us? Right at the very tip of it? That disappearing point, the eye of the needle.

Painting Doubt

11/22/2012

My personal life at the moment is full of doubt.

Doubt as a parent, doubt about where to live, and doubt within the painting.

Doubt. It's an edifying emotion, building walls all around me, blocking out my surroundings. Meanwhile I actually do live in pretty special surroundings. I do have a wonderful partner, two healthy boys and a shed to paint in that I love. And yet still, the doubt.

Twenty years ago a phrase stood out from Paul Baker's book, 'Monks, Minstrels and Milkmen'. About doubt he wrote. "It was a measure of growth, inadvertent subtle stretching in the light, that these real, deep-rooted doubts caused no panic".

More often than not I experience panic alongside doubt. Until I practice with it. Then it's OK to have doubt. I can be with it, not push it away, nor wallow in it. But without the practice it blinds me to my surroundings. Holds me hostage to my own fears. So how do I practice with this? How do I paint from this place of doubt?

I acknowledge its presence. Where does doubt sit in my body? I let go the stories about the doubt, and the doubter (this is the hard bit), and find what lies beneath. Physical unease. Pain. Fear. Then I lean into the experience just as it is, with no other intention than to let it be fully present.

Opening my eyes and ears I hear bird song, cows mooing, the smell of wax, the ache of my body, a muscle spasm, shallow breathing and a spider on the floor. What is the reality here? I have my doubts.

Trying to stay with this present moment awareness... why? Because behind the doubt there is just this. Just the bird song. My eyes opened wider. My awareness delving deeper. Can something within that level of awareness be captured in the wax?

Can the process of painting in doubt, bring doubt to its core? At core, there appears to be nothing.... just this. All of this. When doubt is allowed it gives way to just being... I don't know where the doubting goes but it does. Of course it comes back, although sometimes with less panic attached.

This seems to be my life for now. And that is what I have to paint with. Just this doubt. Exactly here.

Opening Up

10/18/2012

What am I doing when I make art? Why do it at all?

A heart-felt pondering of life purpose, this question also has a practical edge; what is my focus - how do I get into gear - as I approach the shed?

The shed is my studio, but I prefer shed - it's a little more down to earth. I also love the idea of shedding things. We shed stuff so that other stuff can open up.

I once wrote that 'Art is a way of making meaning in our lives'. I still hold to that in some sense, but I might re-describe it as a way of making discoveries in our lives. Meaning is such a heavily laden word. A few years back I asked a visiting teacher: "Please do not laugh, but what is the meaning of life?" He laughed and said, "Does life have to have a meaning?".

These words are easy to misinterpret. Indeed they are still a deep mystery to me, but I do know they are not nihilistic. They point to an opening-up, a wide welcoming of all that life has to offer. In contrast, 'meaning' can sometimes close things down, shutting us off from the other or the offer. This is especially true for meaning we invest with great importance (often for ourselves).

People have asked, 'Does art have to have a meaning?' Those in the ‘art for art’s sake’ camp would argue against. Eco-Artists would argue for. Personally, I am not interested in an art world that only has reference to its own parameters - quite the opposite. But I would go as far as to say that art is better off with a purpose than a meaning.

So to help me on my short walk from house to shed, I try to define what it is I do with my art practice. What is the purpose? Here is my current best shot:

For me, art is a way of opening up to life. It is the expression and exploration of a question, an open enquiry into the unknown. And these days I am less inclined to think it is my job to offer an answer.

Instead I hold the question and try to capture the felt-sense of the exploration, letting go the stories that loop in my mind and finding what lies beneath. What is that quality? How to stay present there and let this infuse my work?

From this space of open enquiry questions unfold. Some I am currently working on include: How to land a line on the page without meaning or tethering of any sort? How to shed all pretense, and paint from the gut? What is left when all else is shed?

Meanwhile the wax flows when hot then settles into stillness. I build up layers then quietly peal them back. The heat-gun squints what the scraper straightens and mistakes become discoveries.

Each step in the creative process involves an opening. Each layer becomes a koan in itself - something to be expressed. How can we open up to exactly this, shedding all else, encompassing all else?

My job is to stay open to the process and convey my experience, then invite the viewer to consider theirs in response.

Beyond Narrative

9/27/2012

Twenty years ago my art college tutor said to me, 'Try to make your work less narrative'.

I felt affronted at the notion that art should be devoid of meaning and merely present an aesthetically interesting form. I continued to lugg around my ideal of making meaning through art. But good advice has a way of morphing over time...

Aitken Roshi wrote, "Teaching in Zen Buddhism is a presentation. It is not merely a device intended to bring about a certain pedagogical result. .... Fundamentally the koan is a particular expression of Buddha nature and your koan work is simply a matter of making that expression clear to yourself and your teacher."

If I am trying to convince an audience through my work, then this is likely to be idea-based. The point about the koan work is that it is beyond mental construct. It requires cutting-off the mind road. And the presentation of the result is original and playful.

This is how I try to approach my work these days. Instead of communicating an idea, a narrative, I try to present an experience. The 'felt sense' of a moment in time.

Gently the mind settles into Mu
and Mu Mind opens.
This opening grows wider with each breath.
Mu at home in the boundless body
Going out to meet the raindrops
Returning to the aching fire.

How to present a fleeting glimpse of being at home in the boundless body?

How to be at home in the boundless body while presenting a fleeting glimpse?