Some thoughts on negative space

9th April 2020

Many sculptors talk about negative space – the form that remains when you carve stuff away. It seems a helpful way to think right now, as so much stuff has gone from our daily lives – not just obligations and meetings we didn’t want to attend, but good human contact, physical touch,  sharing ideas,  performance, dancing together, enjoying the buzz of the crowd. We mourn all this, and long for it to come back, but we are also looking harder at what it has left behind:  the corners and silences we hadn’t noticed, the birdsong, the people we’d been meaning to call. This is the time for the negative space to resonate with meaning.