Matter has been defined and redefined incessantly through time with the evolution of scientific knowledge. Clearly, our questioning of the logic behind the foundation of all physical objects has always been elemental to our understanding of the world we live in. Going back to as early as Antiquity, great thinkers and philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle and Democritus, advanced and constructed upon definitions of this concept, always elevating the degree of understanding of this existential concept. Nowadays, in our Modern Age, a various array of definitions and models of what matter is made of is available to the scientific world. Most commonly, however, knowledge of this concept is limited to atomic dimensions, without second thoughts or questioning. However, science is constantly evolving and therefore, this lack of further questioning limits, excludes, the newer – and somewhat more disturbing- discoveries made, hence that we can see smaller and further than the atom. Matter is made of empty space.
This very knowledge is what utterly captivated and inspired me to create an artwork that captured the full implication of matter being nothing other than empty space. Precisely, symbolism was at the center of my creation process and an interaction with the observer was a mean I explored to transmit it. Also, the symbolism paralleled four of the nine big ideas advanced by Peter Atkins, an influential British chemist and professor at Oxford University, ultimately reinforcing the overall meaning.
The round plastic container, being the base of the project, was selected to show that energy [and matter] is conserved, Atkins’s sixth big idea. Indeed, it contained matter (papers) and it being enclosed in a recipient only showed the conservation of its physical constituents and energy, for example the energy of a charged or excited atom. Furthermore, by writing on its outside that it was "Containing the truth on what matter is made of...," the pun of "Containing" in relation to the container played a role in inviting the observer into the artwork’s discovery and overall experience.
Moving on to the lid of the container, the observer could see constructed upon it a Rutherford-Bohr model of an atom showing precisely Atkins’s first big idea that matter is made of atoms. The outer orbitals had written on them big scale objects, the scale of the objects decreasing as the orbitals got closer to the nucleus. The goal was to show the vast dimensional extent to which matter is questionable in composition and bring a feeling of insignificance to the human existence within a cold world of matter. Furthermore, organizing this decreasing scale into a circular motion only accentuated this feeling, making the questioning converge to the last orbital "Questioning the core of it all..." Not only did this second pun make reference to the nucleus itself, but symbolically to the searching of the "truth on what matter is made of".
As a result, with this questioning being implied, the observer is brought to seek the answers within the artwork itself. In fact, in opening it, one could uncover the underlying truth. In the container, spiralling papers in various lengths and styles could be found with different coloured writing, each with possible answer. My research on the evolution of matter's definitions was what inspired to depict that entropy tends to increase, as stated by Atkins's seventh big idea, by the disorganization and confusion the answers imply.
In the end, having read all of the spiralling papers in the recipient, the observer is left with an empty container. However, when looking closely on the periphery of the recipient, spaced out elements from the periodic table are set to create two words: empty space. This is the answer to all the questioning involved in the artwork. In fact, due to it being stated with elements from the periodic table, it shows that elements display periodicity, which is Atkins’s second big idea. However, it brings this idea to a whole new level, showing that elements do not only have properties and behaviors in common, as in periodicity-wise, but also on larger common ground. They share the same composition: empty space. Symbolically, this is why they can bond and form words to answer the particular question implied by my artwork.