'Bridges and Returning Clouds' Exhibition Statment

On a recent visit to Japan I had time to visit Sendai, a provincial city to the north of Tokyo. Sendai came to the world’s attention when a tsunami swept in from the deep Pacific and took all before it. Never before had I seen street signs that warned of tsumanis. Nearby is the fishing village of Matsushima where elegant, red lacquered wooden bridges link a necklace of small islands.

On Zen master Ungo’s
Narrow, Venerable Verandah
Today
Matsushima’s waters
Stay still.

In Buddhism crossing from the shore of illusion to the shore of enlightenment over the raging river of samsara is a common enough metaphor. A simple plank bridge, that reappears in many Japanese prints is all that is necessary to carry profound meaning.

Bridges link communities and at the same time gather together the landscape. Martin Heidegger says of bridges that they swing over space with ease and power. The bridge brings to the water the expanse of the landscape beyond. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape.

Here at the other end of the great Asia Pacific on the island of Tasmania we find a simple and elegant bridge built by the hands of convicts and conscripted soldiers spaning the river Ross.

The world comes to us with shapes, colours, atmospheres and textures, these are the circumstances of all things. It is not necessary that things be possessed by spirits, although for many that may be the truth, but I prefer to engage imaginatively with an alive world. This is not simply by way of personalizing something, my car or the photocopier or a bridge, a painting or a Jacaranda tree, rather it’s imaginatively allowing the alive nature of things to own their own presence.

During the brief few weeks of early spring each year I try to hold onto the colour of Jacaranda. This vibrantly coloured botanical immigrant has come to mark something quite particular about my city, about my Sydney; Jacarandas are so delightfully suburban yet their colour can never be caught, there is a certain delinquincy in the way they show off. Sometimes they seem to be lit from within, dare I say purple/blue/mauve/lilac/cream, who knows but their show thumps against my eyes causing me to wince sometimes.

The great built world needs to be perceived in terms of its imaginative presence. The space of a bridge, its entrance and the way you leave it, its middle and the highest point of the arch steady the way it suspends space. And then there is the underside of the bridge where trolls, tramps and wanderers linger and the where the smell of urine and wild water mingle. The bridge has both an elevated spirit and a deep dark underworld, it is integral and intimate with both.

I shy away from calling myself a Buddhist even though I have been stumbling along with my Zen practice for nearly forty years. I don’t think of my art work as reflective of Zen except to draw on some simple and consistent metaphors that recur over the years especially in poetry and brush work. The bridge, flowers and the return of the clouds are simple and profound companions of the Way.

The voice of the clouds enters the night and sings


I am inspired by the ink painting and poetry of China and Japan, particularly from the Tang and Sung dynasties.
 I’ve travelled extensively over the years, but in recent times, mainly to Japan and China. My work is greatly influenced by my Zen Buddhist studies.

For both Chinese and Japanese artists and poets, their inspiration are from the moods of nature, the rhythmic flow of organic patterns in clouds, trees, smoke or the flowing of water.
 Water an example of perpetual flowing and becoming – of Constant change and impermanence.

My work, a meditation on water, not aiming at visual representation, but rather expressing vitality and energy with spontaneous and unpredictable splashes, or a gentle flow, depicted by layer upon layer of fluid veils of watery washes.

For many years I have had a deep interest in calligraphy brushwork practice here in Sydney - and also in Japan and China, which has greatly deepened my knowledge and appreciation of their culture and aesthetic.

For the Chinese and Japanese the blank space in a painting – formless and empty, is as important and meaningful as the subject. This empty space – the void, is the source of all forms, the seen and the unseen, as sound comes from silence, the resolution of opposites, therefore they are not separate.  Form is emptiness.  Emptiness is form.

Glenys Jackson



Trees show the bodily form of the wind;
Waves give vital energy to the moon.

Zenrin Kushu


From far and near,
voices of waterfalls are heard -
leaves are falling

Basho