Dawn Lee
Clear
https://dawn-photography.wixsite.com/dawnphotography
Photography and video have enabled me to develop an everyday life-art methodology that makes me calm and centred. Empathy, healing, wellbeing, and patience are important aspects of my work. Being patient and experimenting with video has allowed me to form important self-insights, which rushing through daily life does not allow. Patience engages me in being thoughtful about what I create. The COVID-19 lockdown experience allowed me to re-examine 'who I am' through practices of meditation and solitude. I take my time to allow for reflection and introspection. Solitude provides opportunities to appreciate materials and spaces in new ways that foster my mental health. Solitude is not about cutting myself off from the outside world or disconnecting from others. Rather, I use the process of making artworks to challenge and find a solution for establishing a better understanding and consciousness of inner peace.
In Clear Your Mind? artistic practice and meditation are combined together as an artistic inquiry. I view formal-sitting-meditation as an artistic practice. This approach lets me have an open alternative way of investigating and communicating meditative experiences. This process of meditation as a form of art provides a sense of healthy solitude. My artworks are developed from my own mental health experiences. I document my practices of finding solitude and a consciousness of my inner peace and truth through meditative processes. My artistic expression is a way to establish empathy, healing and wellbeing, as well as building my social identity.
Artistic technologies—such as drawing and movement—which are approached through the mind and the body, are a way to explore and to communicate meditative experiences. I have filmed myself engaged in drawing and movement experiments. Even though I found the outcome of these experiments engaging from the perspective of art making, I wanted to focus more specifically on the practice of meditation and solitude. I began to develop participatory experiments for sharing meditative silence. I have focused on how to construct situations that allow for solitude and a sense of consciousness raising as connected to inner peace and wellbeing.
I understand solitude as not something which cuts "myself off from the outside art world or [disconnects me] from others."[1] Rather, it is about taking time for reflection and introspection, which allow for memories, feelings and goals to come into sharper focus. Being patient and experimenting with video has allowed me to form important self-insights, which rushing through daily life does not allow. Patience engages me to be thoughtful about what I am creating without a rushing to get it done. The solitude of the COVID-19 lockdown gave me the opportunity to explore new materials in my art making. This lockdown experience allowed me to re-examine 'who I am' through practices of meditation, solitude, and processual creativity. These practices allow me to maintain my personal health and wellbeing.
[1] "Feature Shoot, Solitude Is An Important Part Of Being An Artist. Here's Why?" Skillshare Blog, September 14, 2020, https://www.skillshare.com/blog/learn/solitude-is-an-important-part-of-being-an-artist-heres-why
