Ex Nihilo
Black stoneware
Ex Nihilo is a series of black stoneware jars impressed with a list of named black holes translated into binary code. The black hole names become abstracted into a continuous stream of letterpress 0s and 1s, an encoded record of our understanding of these invisible phenomena. The title is a reference to Gottfried Leibniz’s belief in the seventeenth century that the use of binary numerals was symbolic of the religious idea of ‘creatio ex nihilo’, or ‘creation out of nothing’.
The form of the jars is reminiscent of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ urns containing fragments of scripture, uncovered by a young Bedouin shepherd in 1947 who stumbled upon the ceramic jars and manuscripts in a Qumran cave on a rocky hillside.
Black stoneware
Ex Nihilo is a series of black stoneware jars impressed with a list of named black holes translated into binary code. The black hole names become abstracted into a continuous stream of letterpress 0s and 1s, an encoded record of our understanding of these invisible phenomena. The title is a reference to Gottfried Leibniz’s belief in the seventeenth century that the use of binary numerals was symbolic of the religious idea of ‘creatio ex nihilo’, or ‘creation out of nothing’.
The form of the jars is reminiscent of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ urns containing fragments of scripture, uncovered by a young Bedouin shepherd in 1947 who stumbled upon the ceramic jars and manuscripts in a Qumran cave on a rocky hillside.
Installations views, Many Moons exhibition
