“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there’s isn’t one,” Terence James Stannus Gray, who wrote several books on Taoist philosophy under the pen name Wei Wu Wei, said.

Writer and photographer Mary Attard fully comprehends his thought.

“We are pure energies and our sense of selves is just an illusion. We construct time and matter to navigate through our ‘existence’. We also found a way to code what we sense as landscapes, smells, sensations or sounds but all are just frequencies. Understanding this, all that we see is abstractions made sense through our coding. In reality, all is abstractions,” she says.

It is with this concept in mind that Attard has created the works currently on display at the Wignacourt Museum, in Rabat. 

The exhibition is made up of multimedia pieces and photography, which were produced over a number of years and some of which have already been exhibited in previous collective shows.

“In these exhibits, I just captured this abstract realm of our existence, whether these are emotions, fantasy, sheer patterns, colours and textures in nature. It is the silent language of our experience we often bypass or even neglect.

“I capture what makes my heart sing,” the artist says, which includes “her joy, fantasy, awe, rage, gratitude or wonder… my silent language”.

She adds: “They are an expression of a subtle energy of which I manifested tangibly in some way according to circumstances. Both my multimedia pieces and my photography ones are results of such a language by which I try to bring to the awareness of viewers through my diverse expressions.”

In a critique of her work, art critic E.V. Borg wrote: “Mary Attard is a lyric poetess of exquisite delicacy, nobility and sensitivity. Through simplicity, economy and a child-like approach, she captures the essence of life, an overwhelming universality through the­rapy and healing. Her art is hypnotic. It is inspired by sheer beauty in nature that has an affinity with the silken feeling expressed by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem Pied Beauty.

“The artist is attracted to little things like the glorious splashes of colour at sunset, or the child-like wonder of geometry in mundane things, or play of light that the public might bypass or ignore without giving a second thought or not even consider worth the attention…” 

A Silent Language runs at the Wignacourt Museum, in Rabat, until June 8. Opening hours are Monday to Sunday from 9.30am to 5pm, with the last admission at 4pm.