Art and science: Black Whole II
Card, papier mâché, acrylic. 23x29cm. 2025
Exhibited at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, July and August 2025.
A work in my Black Whole series.
The works feature a hemispherical form protruding from the plane of the work and an equal and opposite hemispherical form receding into it.
The work was concieved partly as a visualisation of the positive and negative forces that underlie the physical structure of the universe. The concept is that at the most fundamental level of physical reality nothing exists except what can be thought of metaphorically as a flat featureless plane or surface. This featureless plane represents the existence of “nothingness” and is represented in the artwork by the flat surface of the work. A single disturbance to this plane creates a paired bulge and depression (just as a single wave creates a peak and a trough), represented in the work by the raised hemisphere and the recessed hemisphere.
The bulge and the depression are equal and opposite, so they can be thought of as cancelling each other out. As a result they add nothing to the “energy” at this fundamental level of reality. The fundamental plane is still. on average, flat. So, although something exists (in the form of the bulge and the depression), on average nothing still exists. The creation of ‘something’ does not alter the existence of nothing.
Nothing exists.
The work is painted very matt black to allude to the existence of nothing.