Silencer is an ambitious public action Doris will undertake from 10am-5pm, Monday to Friday, from 12 February to 23 March, in his newly built studio in Lacken, Co Mayo. During this "investigative experiment in the medium of silence", there will be nothing in the studio but himself and he will not be producing any tangible work. Rather, he will meditate, and he has invited members of the public to attend in person or by "remote attention" - ie through meditation.

This unusual undertaking will follow on from Mindgames II, an exhibition of paintings, ink drawings and mixed-media works which is currently on show at the Paul Kane Gallery. It is a distillation of two shows from last year - Mindgames at Ballina Arts Centre and Satsangh at the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.

For Doris, his art practice and spiritual practice are inextricable. A professional healer and a practitioner of Raj meditative yoga, Doris sees both his art and meditation as an investigation into states of consciousness. "They're both involved in seeing more clearly. Clarity of observation and developing awareness is essential for both. Someone described my work as integrating eastern systems of observation with the western visual tradition, and there's something in that."

Doris has always been an individualist.

He was an academically-inclined student at Blackrock College and was heading for a safe career in architecture or law. But within months of the Leaving Cert he dropped several subjects and took up art and economic history. After the exams, he took a year out to travel and to figure out what he wanted to do. "It was during that year that the notion of trying to get into art college arose, and eventually I blagged my way into Dun Laoghaire."

Shortly after finishing college, Doris created his first public intervention:

sticking up 800 paintings of heads around Dublin. This was followed by Artists on the Boards in 1987, in which a group of artists exhibited on advertising billboards. At the time, his work had a strong socio-political aspect, but a more metaphysical strand began to creep in, evident in his first major exhibition in 1989 at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where works on subjects like the Birmingham Six were shown alongside images of mandalas.

It was after this show that Doris received a travel award to India, a trip that was to lead to a new departure in his work.

"Since then the one thing that has been consistent is that it's rooted in research into consciousness, and the basis of that is meditation, " he says. "The media varies an awful lot - through painting, drawings, printing, photography, and then the public interventions like the Croagh Patrick and the Silencer piece, but all of them are anchored in the consciousness process."

Doris sees the meditative and the sociopolitical strands of his work coming together in this exhibition. There are several contemplative ink drawings of wave-like forms, as well as Satsangh No 12, which comprises a group of steel squares arranged in a square and painted deep blue. For Doris, this balanced, abstract work reflects the state of consciousness achieved in group meditation.

These calm works are interspersed with the mixed-media Mindgames pieces - explosions of content that integrate topical newspaper images with looselypainted forms. At times they are touching, at times shocking. They reflect "the understanding that acceptance of the wayward human mind and its projections is essential to realising the subtler and deeper levels of reality. So you're getting content-loaded images reflecting the chaos of the mind, punctuated with images that drop to the subtler and emptier levels of consciousness."

Accompanying each of the Mindgames works is a quote by a writer or philosopher such as Goethe, Joyce or Nietzsche.

"The quotes are actually interchangeable? They're a plethora of notions that are flocking across the images, and I'm not precious about which they're attached to."

For Doris, the focus of his explorations is "to find a visual equivalent to felt experiences, and that the separation of the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the extraordinary, is a false duality".

The art of Doris certainly gives you pause for thought.

Mindgames II continues at the Paul Kane Gallery until 3 February. Silencer runs from 12 February until 23 March at Lacken Studio