The permanence of phenomena – information carriers
A puddle of oil on wet asphalt – after the rain, the photo that became the basis for the Urban mandala embroidered tapestry was taken. I was struck by the beauty of the phenomenon! Of course, other things came up for me, sustainable development and the unsustainable state of affairs that results from endless consumption.
The pace of scientific discovery and the flow of information is leaving behind the technical and chemical wastes of obsolete technology. Information has shed its carriers and changed its clothes: first floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, then servers and clouds… The buried corpses of technological progress line the road to the future.
In this mad dash, I stopped, or rather sat down to embroider, to stop time with an embroidery needle and bring it back to the immediate living environment as meditative content. I picked up the thread. Embroidery itself is a meditative state, its monotony mentally freeing the mind, entangled and tied up in thoughts.
The quilted fabric, reminiscent of patchwork, presenting coloured floppy disks, domesticates the defunct technical article, or more precisely its image, as it is incorporated into a home decorating function: it becomes a wall protector. I display the rainbow-coloured petrol strip on a thangka, a vertical Tibetan silk screen.
The colours of the rainbow are caused by the scattering of white light. In Bon Buddhism, white is the colour of space, the fifth element, where all that exists is embodied. It is in this space that the statement unfolds, literally embodied (embodied, appearing as a “carved” body with tapestry stitching, embroidered like a tattoo) in the first line of the Mahaparinirvana: “All phenomena are impermanent.”
The carrier of the information, a female body printed on a construction mesh, supporting the claim that everything is impermanent, becomes translucent (due to its translucent character) by illumination, making only the embroidered characters visible, a kind of shadow, a memento mori on the wall.
Györgyi Kapala