About…

There is surely some deep connection between my love of whirling like a dervish and my enjoyment of making mandalas. Both are centring techniques, and a whirling skirt is as circular as a mandala is. Whirling is the wild, active, Sufi approach, while mandalas are the calm, quiet, Buddhist approach to the same search, to find the eye of the chaotic whirlwind within our minds, the silent centre that is the seat of the being…

Although the mandala form (and the term ‘mandala’) is most often associated with Tibetan Buddhist art, there are innumerable instances of it in every culture. The rose windows and labyrinths of medieval Christianity, the domed mosques and Sufi whirling dervishes of Islam, Hindu temples, the sand paintings of the North American Indians, as well as the pyramids of Ancient Egypt and Central and South America, are all based on the same form with its multiple symmetries radiating from a central point…

These mandalas are essentially an applied art: their primary function is as an aid to meditation, a sort of trap for the mind. Attracted by their vivid colours and the intricate tracery of their lines, the eye falls ensnared into a rhythmical spider’s web, dancing from line to line, while being ever drawn in towards the still point at the centre. Once engaged with the design, the mind also sets off on its own private healing journey through whatever lies encoded within the magic circle and its hidden harmonics… 

An alternative aesthetics (with a little help from Osho and George Gurdjieff).

Mandalas of all kinds are almost invariably born from a vision, or an aesthetic, in which beauty is (consciously or unconsciously) accepted and valued as an inherent need with a natural, easy expression whose forms will evoke a positive resonance in all (‘natural’) people…