Mindfulness isn’t just the act of thinking deeply, it’s about being, in your entirety, with yourself, by connecting to both the concrete and transient properties of things around you.
There are mindfulness practitioners who will disagree with that, and they’re likely right, but here, in Karesansui, an exhibition by Dan O’Dempsey, it’s about absorbing those passing reflections on your own sense of self and learning from them.
The exhibition draws on Japanese Karesansui gardens (hence the title), elements of Taoism and the wide-reaching branches of mindfulness to share ways that can help you to build a better understanding of yourself, and accept it.
Karesansui are the dry zen gardens of Japan, with evenly prepared earth covered in level gravel. Sense of space is offered by rocks, representing mountains and imagined landscapes. They are designed to instill balance, and are cared for with diligence. Different species of moss are encouraged and cultivated to pristine levels of perfection.
Their creation, as much as their upkeep is not dissimilar to this exhibition, where the facilitator presents a restrained sense of themselves through ridges in the fine gravel, so that others can get lost in their presentation of many small moments of reflection, as they intersect.
Dan O’Dempsey gives visitors a chance to engage in that act, through installations and paintings that tour through words and recorded deeds in ways that share how they occurred.
By learning from and producing personal reflective criticisms of various mindfulness techniques, Dan O’Dempsey is offering everyone who enters this space a set of experiences that are as close as possible to the way he experienced them himself. And it’s pretty stunning.
The Karesansui garden at the centre of the exhibition, shrouded in pallets, brings the space into its own geography, siting it firmly in a building that chooses pallets, chipboard and OSB to clad the majority of its walls. Raking through the sand, you feel connected but equally isolated. The piano, obviously out of place, offers lightness and inquisition.
There are moments for many, particularly those of us working in the art world, where our thoughts chase us, and catch us when we think we’ve beaten them, no matter what delicate landscape we’re in. So being able to accept them, rather than hiding is crucial, if not easy.
Dan O’Dempsey is neurodivergent. His ASCV, ADHD, OCD and Tourette’s haven’t always informed his work this directly, but here they open the door for one of the most openly self-reflective exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time. By allowing viewers into these thought processes, and these experiences, he isn’t just opening up, but asking us to experience the environment that exists in his own mind.
The experiences, some funny, some less so, build a sense of Dan. They’re natural, sometimes passive. There’s trauma that is allowed to exist in this reflection but it’s trauma that, to many, can seem mild.
“I’m not a fan of idle chit chat” reads some scribbled pencil over one painting on loose canvas [cover image]. It’s a grumble for some, but a crutch for others. That line, stumbled across during a walk around the gallery jumped out at me, because my memories of speaking to Dan are deep ones. Even simple questions lead to detailed conversations with intricate back and forth. Even if it’s just about passing an email on, or a tear in a sofa.
That willingness to pull out the detail and pour it into a room, sharing not just your thoughts but the way in which you had them, screams too loud to ignore in this show. And it’s powerfully refreshing.