One Moon

'One Moon' (2010) by Damchö Drolma (Michelle Tonkin) is an introspective artwork marking a profound personal and spiritual transition. Created during the pivotal months before Damcho's departure from monastic life, the piece embodies contemplation, ritual, and transformation through delicate, yet powerful symbolism.

Exhibited in 2011 at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, and created the year before in France, 'One Moon' explores themes of impermanence, transcendence, and the latent potential within life's un-illuminated spaces. Over thirty nights, coinciding with the Tibetan lunar month of Saga Dawa, Damchö conducted her own ritual contemplations using the mediums of her body, a brush, ink and paper—scribing a body scaled lotus for each day. The resulting suite of artworks poetically captures the relationship between mortality, potential, sediment, and bloom — each subtly reflecting the delicate fracture between monastic ideals and the stark realities already pressing against them — a tension that would soon propel Damchö’s departure from monastic life.

Each lotus emerges from symbolic mud and water—elements that simultaneously nourish and obscure—highlighting how conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability can foster deep inner transformation. A central thread unifies the moments depicted in the artwork, representing continuity and the cyclical rhythm of time, anchored in Buddhist philosophy and reflective practice.

With this installation, Damchö offers viewers a contemplative space to reflect on life's ephemeral yet profound nature, resonating with both individual and collective human experiences of change.

The catalogue notes follow:


**damchö drolma**
*One Moon*
20.05.2011 – 18.06.2011

**Artist’s Statement**

Reflecting on death, one is reminded of potential.

For thirty consecutive days, during the Tibetan lunar month of Saga Dawa, I took some time to adopt the pose that the Buddha laid in when he passed away. I lay on my paper, considered my day, as though it were a lifetime and reflected on how I had lived and whether or not I was prepared for death.

Inevitably accepting my lack of preparedness, I took an ink brush or pen in my left hand and traced the line of my body from my feet to my heart. Using that scale I drew a lotus, as though the potential of a day (and a life) could be expressed in this form. The roots of the lotus are bound and sustained by fecund sediment. It’s stem rises through murky and unilluminated waters. The mud and water nourish the lotus but cannot cling to its bloom. The lotus flower rises stainlessly free of – yet completely dependent on – its origin.

Though my gestures on paper are records of unfulfilled potential, of unillumination, the moments that they represent are themselves the fertile ground and conditions, the mire, from which potential can bloom.

In recognition of this, the centre of each budding lotus is thread with a string that highlights thirty such opportunities over one lunar cycle.

This year, Saga Dawa begins on the 2nd of June. Within this month, the 15th of June marks the anniversary of Buddha’s enlightenment and his paranirvana (his passing away). It is also the day of a total lunar eclipse.

This being so, a verse comes to mind that brings together a reflection on potential with the penumbral event. It was composed by a nun called Mutta, who lived at the time of the Buddha.

*Free woman,
Be free
As the moon is freed
From the eclipse of the sun.*