The creative void

How 'astonishing emptiness' is often the first stage of making powerful new work.

Recently a piece of my art was used for the cover of a magazine. Yesterday I was standing talking with a friend when she pointed to the copies stacked behind me on a shelf. “Are you making lots more beautiful art?” she asked. “In your lovely studio?”

She dragged the word studio out - stuuuu-dee-ohh - whilst trailing her hand languidly through the air, a wistful look on her face. The implications was clear - she saw me living a dreamy life of easy production in an idyllic room in which my muses and I relaxed on velvet chaise longues, stirring only to easily knock up a masterpiece.

I answered with a jaunty, “I’m working on it!” when what I really wanted to say was. “No, because I am in the dark, confusing Void stage of creation when nothing happens but chaos and confusion and there is no clear way out.”

You know those days. The desire to create is there, a stirring rippling out from your soul and hovering high over the surface of the worktable, but actual ideas remain illusive and unformed, hidden in dark crevices of your mind. You dutifully attend your studio or put your behind on your writing chair and there you remain, pushing paint or words about and creating only sludge.

The Void feels a dangerously permanent, all-encompassing, terminal space. Each time it arrives, it feels like a certain sign that you are no creator, that you are an empty-headed pretender and should give up your fanciful affectations and go and get a proper job. Because, so we tell ourselves, proper jobs equate to constant productivity and something to show for your time.

In fact, The Void is a key part of the creative process and so we might as well recognise and embrace it when it comes knocking, rather than hiding behind the sofa and pretending it is not hammering on the door. Indeed, we might even be so bold as to go looking for it and actively invite it home.

I rather like the Biblical phrase for it - ‘tohu va bohu’. The author of Genesis uses it when telling a story to answer the serious question asked by many generations: how was our amazing world created? The author uses it to conjure a mysterious, dark, somewhat threatening, primordial matter. I, however, less reverently, always imagine Tohu and Bohu, two mischievous pointy-eared hobgoblins with a penchant for running amok and stealing clarity and focus.

The phrase is often translated as ‘formless’ and ‘chaos’ though one translation has it as ‘ astonishingly empty’ which speaks well to our expectation that our minds should always be full of ideas and our days permanently jammed with activity. When we hold that mindset tightly, voids surprise us and not in a good way. Times which feel like ‘empty deserts’ (to use another translation) can feel threatening to our continued identity and existence and make us consider migrating to a place of more bounty and provision. Like Netflix.

Interestingly, however, the writer of this particular creation myth doesn’t necessarily portray The Void as something that comes before the creator walks in; there was nothing and then creation started… Rather the Hebrew can be read to imply that the creation process actually began with the formlessness. In the beginning stage of the creation when there was tohu and bohu, formlessness and chaos….

Some voids are imposed upon us, unwanted shattering events, slashing through the whole of life as we know it. Yet even these absences can themselves form the space to incubate great works of creation.

Memory Void and Shalekhet installation by Menashe Kadishman; Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin has five intentional voids, including a tall bleak shaft known as The Memory Void. There, on the floor lies artwork by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, who called his installation "Shalekhet," or "Fallen Leaves." He dedicated the over 10,000 faces covering the floor to all innocent victims of war and violence everywhere. (This powerful video gives you the sound the sculpture makes when, as intended, visitors must walk across it.)

The disruption of flow and emotional discombobulation the Memory Void causes is an intentional symbol of the history of the Holocaust it represents, and its widening to all war experiences, yet it is also an illustration of the process of creation from within an imposed void. Libeskind says,

“When I was invited by the Berlin Senate in 1988 to participate in the competition for the Jewish Museum I felt that this was not a program I had to invent or building I had to research, rather one in which I was implicated in the beginning, having lost most of my family in the Holocaust…”

Voids of this kind draw us - eventually, at unforeseeable times - to specific works which respond to a specific relationship or subject that has been wrenched from that void. We are drawn to works of commemoration, reparation, and continuation. Whether we make a bold, starkly defiant, public statement like Libeskind or engage in gentle acts of private dedication such as tending to a late loved one’s garden, the externally created void provides both the impetus and the content of our creations. First, however, the void needs to be experienced and its implications internalised.

Other, more creative-focused voids need to be created deliberately, an act that brings its own challenges. Since we instinctively recoil from loss, the self-imposition of it is not easy. Yet, it is vital. Put simply, we need to make space for what will come from our creativity. There needs to be space for newness, room to explore, and capacity to grow.

Ah yes, you might think, this I can get on board with, for there is pleasure in a clean and orderly studio, a fresh sketchbook, a new computer file, or the definition of a new project. But no. The Void is less about physical tidying up and much more about the psychological experience of being lost. It is about being in a place where what comes next is not a reiteration of our last work but something new even to our own intentions.

The Void is a place of sensing your way forward, hands out in front of you in the dark. It is about trust in what is not at all apparent, about the ability to sit with not knowing. Nothing is recognisable, nothing is certain. Working in The Void feels like pushing through layers of ebony velvet curtains in a deep cave.

How we experience our voids is up to us. One option is to rail against the way it discomfits and temporarily disables us, to see it as dangerous, unwelcoming, and scary. We can avoid it and scuttle back to the previous stage, extending it by making more and more of the same. Or engage in descriptive self-criticism at our failure to produce, our flakiness.

Alternatively, we can welcome it as an embryonic space in which we can for a while float free of obligation, safe and warm. Eventually, pressure will build and we will move towards a moment when the light of clarity strikes and we leave the Void but for now we can have faith that even as we turn and stretch, listening to our own heartbeat, we will be growing imperceptibly, preparing for the actualisation stage.

How do we create such a void then? We must contract ourselves to create space. It is not a question of giving up what we know or saying Never Ever to the myriad ways we could express our potential, so much as it is about pushing the tried and tested options back to the edges of our lives, compacting them a bit, to create a sense of unfulfilled openness. Time must be made to not produce, to not be able to explain to others what we are doing, to follow dead ends and make notes on subjects of no relevance which draw us in anyway. We must shun the God of Productivity and allow Tohu and Bohu to occupy our minds as their playground. The noise of the world with its rules and expectations must be banished. Our egos, so invested in our reputations as experts and masters must be invited to step aside.

And why should we do this extraordinarily uncomfortable work? Because it is from The Void that the unexpected comes, from its depths that the personally powerful and societal significant work comes. It is from the formless that originality stems. In the velvet silence, uncluttered with the opinions and examples of others, our voices can be heard when we whisper, “Let there be….”. And so there will be whatever you create from deep within you, and there will be not only work which is new but an artist renewed and you will see, if you try this for yourself, that it is good.

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For you to ponder:

When did you last enter a Void? What was your experience?

What do you need to set aside to create a new void by choice?

What will you be tempted to take into the void with you for comfort that you really should leave at the entrance?

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From the studio

There is chaos in the painting studio this week as I play randomly with materials to give my hands something to do while I let not-yet-fully-formed ideas swirl in my mind.

And there is a new, blue, glass fronted ‘she shed’ at the bottom of the garden which is, for this habitually untidy artist, ‘astonishingly empty’ save for some meditation props and things to keep me warm. It is designated as a journaling, writing ( but not editing) space, a meditation space and an escaping of noise space in which I can sit and think. It is, I think, still therefore a studio, empty though it is of any art equipment.

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And finally, a blessing….

May you enter your voids with trust and faith. May you sit in them with open hearts and minds. May you exit them with clarity and vision.

Shalom,

Helen