I doodle, I dance, I collect straight sticks, I measure my brainwaves, I explore ‘free time’, I grow slime moulds and sculpt bioplastics: my art practice is like some metaphysical goo seeping out across my works. This is what happens:

Often, something as simple as observing someone’s hands, can feel like a glimpse of the miraculous occurring in between what I recognise in the gesture, and the unknowable complexity of such sensual animation. This moment is uncanny and reveals that beyond what is visible exists an ever-present dimension, inaccessible to human-scientific observation. I feel this nonhuman dimension in my body. The feeling that ‘my body is not really my body’ drives this radical curiosity about matter: I haven’t yet reached the point where it’s all become ‘normal’ to me.

Most of the time I feel I’m ‘an entity of somewhat complex origins’ and this makes me take a marginal position: at the edge is a space of the nameless where more-than-human liveness lingers. This is where I belong, turned towards a disposition that is felt, fleshy, and by diving deep into materiality, it becomes a spiritual adventure. It’s through the Eastern traditions of nonduality that I map the inquiries of my work. This philosophy-by-practice — contemplation, meditation and movement — is an inheritance that I deeply value and that guides the embodied methods I invent. My experiences of animism in Zimbabwe and Japan have convinced me that there is an expanded field of agency on earth: my work proposes ways of listening to it with a sensuous attention.

© Dominique Bonarjee