What will your next thought be?

"What Will Your Next Thought Be?" is an exploration of a type of meditation technique used to unclutter the mind. Focus is placed on your breath and whilst doing that you ask yourself, ‘what will my next thought be?’. The result is your mind that goes blank. To help my mental health during antidepressant withdrawal symptoms and generally feeling overcommitted I attempted to expand on this technique by practising focused attention meditation at the same time. Focused attention can be trained on any object (e.g., a mantra, a deity, or a flame). In doing so it helps to stabilise the mind and bring it to stillness. The central theme of this work revolves around that idea and its aim to achieve mental stillness, clarity and respite in today's often overwhelming world.

The object I chose to focus on was a piece of blank A4 office paper.

During the pandemic I challenged myself to photograph ‘boring objects’, including staples, a washing basket, an empty wine bottle and also a piece of A4 paper, with a beauty aesthetic. This new body of work expands on that but also delves into the meditative and therapeutic process through the repetitive act of folding, tearing, scrunching and un-scrunching a piece of white blank A4 paper, whilst thinking about my breath. White paper was necessary to create the illusion of purity and simplicity. It also required much concentration and focus technically during the process of photographing and printing, therefore excluding any intrusive and random thoughts.

Globalisation is an underlying theme by using A4 sized paper, a standardised object. In a world where millions of images are created every second I enjoy the irony of making work of a standardised banal and boring object and at the same time creating aesthetically beautiful images that were calming and restorative to my thoughts when creating and also now when viewing the work. What will your next thought be?