Jill O’Bryan. Tonglen Breath Drawings. 2018. Graphite, oil pastel on rice paper. Sizes vary.

The drawings in this series are both extensions and recordings of a Tibetan Buddhist breathing practice focused on building compassion wherein external suffering is visualized and inhaled by the practitioner, to be exhaled as a positive energy. Each work’s title includes the total number of drawn breaths within a noted timeframe (i.e: 31,616 Breaths between May 8 and December 12 +9396 Breaths July 7, 2018). As with other breath-based drawings by O’Bryan, the act of marking breath on paper not only records, but physically transforms, the same thing it is recording. This reciprocal transformation pushes the work beyond the binaries of representation/abstraction towards an intersectional practice of meditation, performance, and archiving.