Reading Unravelling the Intent Sūtra

During the period in which Damchö was producing a series of blown-glass orbs, she was reading the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra (Unravelling the Intent), a Mahāyāna Buddhist text in which dialogue explores the interpretation and meaning of ultimate and relative reality, with particular attention to underlying intent. This particular form was conceived with the sūtra in mind, bringing the artist’s reading and contemplation into the physical act of making.

As air enters the molten glass, its expanding surface takes shape around an empty interior, creating a delicate vessel defined as much by the space it contains as by the material that surrounds it. Breath, ordinarily invisible and fleeting, gives form to the glass, leaving a tangible trace of the artist’s exhalation, while the intention accompanying it remains unseen.

Reading Unravelling the Intent Sūtra forms part of the artist’s practice-based PhD investigation into whether deliberately cultivated intention, enacted through artistic practice, might itself constitute an artwork. The work brings together contemplation, breath and material transformation, exploring how an intention might be present in an artwork without being explicitly visible in its finished form.