The Skin Around the Void
This week I finished reading Chloe Cooper Jones’ memoir Easy Beauty. While the entire book was an unfurling recalibration of what I thought I believed about disability, parenting, fear, denial, and happiness, I was most impacted by Jones’ experiences of beauty and how they led her into a deeper experience of the present moment.
In the book she has a revelatory experience inside Richard Serra’s sculpture Torqued Ellipses. Serra’s sculpture consist of large metal walls that form concentric circles; his intention was to “torque both the interior and exterior walls of the sculpture so that they were constantly shifting between leaning toward and away from each other…so that as one walked between them, seeing them in part, their mind could not correctly autofill the rest of the shape; any assumptions would, with each step, constantly be proven wrong.”
In making these sculptures, Serra studied the “Japanese concept of ma, the idea that the space, the gap, the absences, between two objects, between two ideas, between sentences, words, breaths, held as much importance as the things themselves.” So the sculpture becomes the absence created by the visible material of metal surrounding it, what Serra calls the “skin around the void.”
Jones’ describes her experience walking through the walls of the sculpture: “As I walk between them, my imagined path through - established in an instant by past knowledge and projected future - is continually thwarted. The light keeps changing. There is no stable way of seeing - what I can see is in flux, degrading, reshaping the exact moment in which I happen to stand there and as I keep walking and time keeps going by, what I see keeps shifting, becoming duller or brighter or bluer in new light. I become more alert, more attentive. I stand closer to the sculpture, observing with increased care, trying to discern exactly what might change and when.”
In sharing this experience, Jones’ reminds me that existing in this gap between what we knew and what we have yet to know, being in the void, is where we experience the present moment. One of my favorite ways to make this more tangible is to practice pausing between the exhaled breath and the next inhale. Try it with me. Begin by blowing every last gram of air out. Pause for three seconds. Inhale so slowly that the air is silent as it moves through your nostrils. Repeat for 10 breaths. Notice what you become aware of in your body or the space around you as you exist more and more in the gap between breaths.
If you’d like to learn more about Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, check out this video episode from The Lonely Palette Podcast: