The Fourth Bardo ( from "Interior Design" )
installation, Kingston Gallery, approx 12 x 18 x 8 inches, various media, lights
2007

My work in this show was mainly concerned witht the futility of making physical representations of the unknowable. It’s about attempting a series of meditations from the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead. This work teaches that our experiences are fleeting, and our reality transient, because our Self is impermanent. The division of life (and death) into in-between states, or Bardos, is a way of exploring, at a very deep level, conscious and subconscious experiences of self.

The context that I needed to do these meditations gradually became clear to me. I found I was unable to envision, as the Bardo Thodol offers, swarms of seething dieties with many arms, or rafts of benificent deities radiating golden light. I have the same problems reading the Bible. So, in order to take on this very profound subject I had to re-make the visualizations in some way, and the way I could do this was through picturing the bardos as various rooms--ordinary rooms I might encounter in waking life, and in dreams. Of course, these tiny rooms are absurd--I have literally reduced philosophical concepts to a dollhouse scale--which reflect the tininess of the reach of human understanding. I also hope the rooms are funny. I know I had fun putting tiny dustballs in the corners.