(Michelle Tonkin)
Contemplative art-research. Embodied practice. Relational repair.
Damchö (Michelle Tonkin) is an artist-researcher and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is a PhD candidate at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, where her practice-led research, Unexpecting Enlightenment: Sculpting Intent and the Aesthetics of Attention, investigates how ritual operates through the body as a site of attention and meaning.
Her research centres on Sculpting Intent: a framework developed across thirty years of practice in which intention itself is the primary artistic material, shaped with the same sustained attention a sculptor brings to form. At its heart is a return to aisthesis — perception as sensed in and through the body.
Her practice draws on a lived history of contemplative discipline and rupture. Across two decades of Buddhist practice, including ten years as an ordained Vajrayana nun, intention became both medium and method - and the body, the site of the work. In 2017, she was one of eight people who co-signed an open letter naming decades of abuse committed by a prominent figure in Tibetan Buddhism. The letter catalysed worldwide reckonings within Buddhist communities and emerged in the same cultural moment as the global #MeToo movement. It remains a live thread in her practice: what happens when devotion eclipses discernment, and how repair - personal, relational, institutional - becomes an aesthetic and ethical question.
Her interdisciplinary research spans contemporary art, ritual studies, performance studies, and religious studies, with ongoing engagement across scholarly and artistic contexts in Australia, the UK, Europe, and the USA. She is a contributing scholar with the SWell Research Network (ARC Discovery Project) and the INFORM network at the London School of Economics, and is affiliated with the Strother School of Radical Attention, Brooklyn. She has been interviewed by major media outlets worldwide and has appeared in several documentaries.
Damchö holds a Master of Contemporary Art (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has contributed to the Bloomsbury Visual Arts Series and a forthcoming Routledge volume, and is the author of Sculpting Intent: Selected Works (Nada Press, 2026). Her exhibition and performance practice spans three decades across Australia, Asia, UK, USA and Europe. Her writing appears alongside her visual practice as parallel gestures in a sustained inquiry into embodiment, ritual, and relational repair.
She lives, loves, and creates on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. She was born on Gadigal Country, and her great-grandparents were Celtic and Cornish immigrants to these unceded lands.