Sculpting Intent: Early Works 1997–2000

From material gesture to ritual erasure, this archive traces the formative years of a practice evolving toward inner form, embodied attention, and the sculpting of intent.

This archive presents a sequence of early works created by Damchö (formerly Michelle Tonkin) between 1997 and 2000. Spanning publication, drawing, and performative installation, these works trace the gradual evolution of a conceptual and embodied practice. What begins as an exploration of gesture, language, and perception shifts toward an increasingly immaterial, process-driven inquiry. During this period, the artist moved from formal mark-making into a lived philosophical commitment.

By early 2001, this progression culminated in a conscious transition into Buddhist monastic life — not as a departure from art, but as its extension: a durational performance practice shaped by presence, ethical discipline, and what the artist would later call “sculpting intent.”

Artist’s entry in Emptiness (1997), a conceptual publication compiling personal definitions of emptiness. This early text introduces the idea of “the unboundedness of the heart” — a theme that continues to shape the artist’s work.

1997 – Emptiness (Publication)

The publication Emptiness brought together reflections from a diverse group of contributors — artists, scientists, spiritual teachers, curators, and children — each responding to the idea of “emptiness” from within their own discipline. Over 100 people were invited to respond. Contributors included Sir Gustav Nossal, Shane Gould, Andrea Hull, Dennis Paphitis, and Rosemary Crumlin.

Damchö’s own contribution introduced a theme that would echo throughout her later practice: the idea of incompletion as a space of possibility. Language was framed as a site of conceptual drawing — a place where unfinished lines opened up unboundedness. Her entry concluded: “Emptiness is the unboundedness of the heart.”

Entry by Professor Sir Gustav Nossal in Emptiness (1997), framing emptiness as a call to action — a space to be filled through public health, compassion, and global care.

'Emptiness', installation view, featuring the collection of handwriten reflections on emptiness printed on transparent plastic sheets. Victorian College of the Arts Grad Show, (BFA., Painting) University of Melbourne, 1997.

Following this conceptual investigation into space and openness, Damchö's attention turned more directly toward the embodied act of drawing in space. This took form during a residency at The George Hotel Tower in St Kilda on Bunurong Country in Naarm/Melbourne.

1998 – Sky Drawings (George Hotel Tower Residency)

Created during a residency at the George Hotel Tower in St Kilda, these intimate pencil drawings responded to the movement of the sky and the artist’s own bodily rhythm. Realised as a series of 60-second observational pauses — one for each minute of the day, fluidly gathered over the year-long residency — the drawings embodied a contemplative engagement with change and attention.

Many were later erased, but they epitomised Damchö’s early drawing practice: as both meditation and trace — ephemeral rather than fixed.

As part of this sky-focused dialogue, the artist once encountered a bird landing beside her on the tower ledge. This became a symbolic and poetic turning point. In response, a text was scribed onto 108 blue balloons — a meditation on a transparent, footless bird mentioned by Val in a Tennessee Williams play. The bird, inseparable from the sky, became a metaphor for breath, offering, and the nature of the mind.

Balloons launched from the rooftop of the George Hotel tower in St Kilda, carrying the artist’s text about a transparent blue bird mentioned in a Tennessee Williams play — a bird living it's entire life in the sky, forever drifting on air currents. This quiet gesture imagined the sky, the mind, and the ephemeral path of the balloon offering as one continuous field.

This commitment to process and presence deepened in unexpect!, a project developed for the 1999 Melbourne International Festival.

1999 – unexpect! (Melbourne International Festival, Herring Island)

Installed inside a makeshift hut on Herring Island, unexpect! was a three-week drawing and performance-based work for the exhibition Probe, curated by Maudie Palmer and Bryony Marks. Damchö undertook a self-directed retreat inside the structure, drawing daily while inviting visitors to offer a personal gesture or action — something the artist “could not anticipate.” The project was inspired by the Buddhist parable of 'The Frog from the Well', and explored the relationship between sensory limits and conceptual expansion.

These interactions formed what curator Bryony Marks described as a ritual dialogue between solitude and encounter.

As Marks wrote:

“Tonkin engages with the philosophical complexities of the relationship between what we know and what is outside of our tangible experience — that which exceeds our expectations, experiences, sensory limitations.”

She envisages her three weeks in the hut as a retreat, where the enforced geographic solitude of the island encourages meditation on her own obstructions and ways she can outreach them.”

Her drawings document this process of discovery… acknowledging the importance of ritual to perceptual discovery.”

In her anti-conquering position of passivity, Tonkin accepts our invasion of her retreat, metaphorically inverting our pioneering history.”

Live response drawings from unexpect! (1999), created in the artists hut on Herring Island for Probe, during the Melbourne International Festival. Each drawing responds to a visitor’s offering — an action, skill, or moment the artist could not anticipate. Using pen, brush, and blue-black ink, the artist marked the encounter in gestures, traces, and fragments of text. Over 100 drawings were created during Probe and were exhibited in the Herring Island Gallery.

Fragment of the invitation for Waive (2000), Mass Gallery. Featuring a photocopied and affixed image of a kneadable rubber — the tool used to erase the artist’s previous drawings in a final act of letting go.

2000 – Waive (Mass Gallery - Final Pre-Monastic Exhibition)

Waive functioned as a closing gesture. Nearly all drawings from unexpect! and Sky Drawings- plus drawing suites from field trips into the remote landscape - were systematically erased in a live, durational performance. This act of erasure was not destruction but release — guided by the belief that intent, not form, was the true site of artistic inquiry. This principle would define the next decade of Damchö's life as an ordained Buddhist nun.

The only surviving material from Waive is a fragment of the exhibition invitation, which featured a colour photocopy of kneadable rubber — the central tool of the installation. This object was quietly prophetic. Not only did it enact the artist’s interest in erasure and process, but it also foreshadowed the later use of rubber (in latex form) in Bodhi Unbound, a post-monastic body of work centred on constraint, transformation, and sensory form.

2001 — Ordination and Durational Performance

In February 2001, Damchö entered monastic life, receiving ordination from Kyabje Trulshik Rinpoche and the name Ngawang Damchö Drolma. (Until this time, she had worked under the name Michelle Tonkin.) This transition was not a departure from artistic practice, but rather its radical continuation: a long-form performance in which the materials were presence, discipline, and inner form. The body became the site of the work; motivation became the medium. This phase — though materially undocumented — sustained and deepened the artist’s ongoing commitment to sculpting intent.