A deeper kind of nothing

• Main Author: Abraham, Catherine
• Other Authors: MacKenny, Virginia
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Humanities 2019
• Subjects: Fine Art
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30539

'Nothing’1 is frequently associated with insignificance. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'to reduce to nothing is to consider or treat as worthless or unimportant’. This project aims to reveal that this form of nothing is, essentially, something. As a child, I was told that my struggle with breath, with asthma, was nothing but psychosomatic. The heart of this project is a physical manifestation of a psychosomatic nothing, and the sense of personal insignificance implied by repetitive, unacknowledged housework. The overarching title, A Deeper Kind of Nothing, was garnered from theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing: Why there Is Something Rather than Nothing (2012) in which he explores the origins of our universe. In this book, he refers to nothing as the space that exists where something once was, an absence. He explains that 'all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing - involving the absence of space itself - and which may one day return to nothing’ (2012: 183). Krauss asserts that 'nothing is every bit as physical as something’, and this idea of a 'deeper nothing’ stirred my thinking. Nothing is one thing, but a deeper nothing, one that the universe may have arisen from, is quite another. Relating this to the impact of seemingly insignificant objects, events and feelings, nothing becomes something physical that is understood to be both tangible and generative of something new. It is this 'something new’, the outcome of what is considered 'nothing’, which is the deeper kind of nothing that this project presents. My reflections on generative nothingness have produced a series of performative processes: 1. Collecting - breaths, eggshells (the main materials of this body of work) and words 2. Working with breath, eggshells and words, on my own and with others 3. Conversing while painting eggshells. These methodologies are made manifest here in a book that is a record of the transcribed texts, short films, balloons, painted eggshells and boxes, bronzes and residue from a 'banquet’. Discarded eggshells and exhaled breaths are traces of the everyday that are typically overlooked. The dispensability inherent in both provides a basis from which to express real and imagined subjugation experienced by 'the good child’, 'the good wife’ and 'the good mother’: the child who felt shame for causing a fuss over her struggle to breathe and the wife who walked on eggshells.