(Michelle Tonkin)
Damchö - Contemplative Art. Living Inquiry. Creative Practice.
Damchö (also known as Michelle Tonkin and formerly as Damchö Dyson) is an artist-researcher and writer whose practice unfolds at the thresholds of embodiment, ritual, ecology, and relational repair. Working across installation, writing, performance, and visual poetics, her work traces how love, rupture, form, and breath shape the quiet gestures through which transformation becomes possible.
Her research is rooted in over three decades of contemplative practice and art-making, including ten years as an ordained Buddhist nun and Vajrayana and Vinaya, and training in India, Nepal, Taiwan, and France.
Damchö has lived and worked in Australia, France, the UK, and India, and holds a Master of Contemporary Art (First Class Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has contributed chapters to the Bloomsbury Visual Arts Series and a forthcoming Routledge volume.
She lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, in Naarm/Melbourne.
Embodied Practice
Damchö’s visual and performative practice draws from a lived history of ritual discipline and rupture. From a decade of monastic life to explorations in latex, landscape, and breath-based ritual, her work responds to the sacred and the wounded — often coexisting in the same gesture. Her installations such as Make Love Your Practise, Formless Intimacies, and Subscendental Birth trace symbolic architectures and embodied atmospheres that invite transformation without finality.
These works do not stage resolution, but rather create spaces for unfolding — for sensing what pulses beneath the surface, what longs for witness, and what remains in quiet relation.
Writing as Inquiry
For Damchö, writing is an extension of breath — a contemplative practice shaped by grief, devotion, critical intimacy, and philosophical listening. Her texts live between poetic reflection and theoretical inquiry, tracing themes of ritual, language, ecological entanglement, and the felt experience of becoming.
Essays such as Breathing Between Earth and Sky, Punctuating the Unspeakable, and her conversation in The Art of Being Unbound explore the unspeakable, the affective, and the transformative. These writings do not stand apart from her visual practice, but unfold alongside it — parallel gestures in a ritual ecology of becoming.