The characters in DeLillo’s novels often struggle with the fact that the unending volume of information and stimuli they face in modern life makes it impossible to find true silence or emptiness.  They seek to find meaning and identity in shopping and possessions, and by filling the void with things and actions.  In doing so they have no ‘nothingness’ – quiet, calm, and capacity for imagination.

The term “Exact Air’ comes from an essay by Le Corbusier from 1933 in which he discussed the need to create order and certainty in man-made environments, where everything was constant and everything controlled. 

The need to control and shape our lived environment, and the need to fill our days and minds with information and busyness seem to be part of the same overall problem we face at this time in the world.

Making and looking at art is an opportunity to go to a place of nothingness, a place of quiet, creativity, reflection, and healing.  Where the outside world is left behind for a while. 

John Burnside – ‘Aurochs and Auks’ – “Nowhere is the source of unbidden memories, the hinterland where poetry and improvisation and even the solutions to mathematical theorems breed.  Many our best ideas come out of nowhere, where the usual orthodoxies do not hold sway.”

Jeanette Winterson – “Imagination allows us to experience ourselves and our world as something that is relational and interdependent.  Everything exists in relation to everything else”.

The pictures here are dominated by the square and the geometric. They are man-made, but with the emphasis on hand-made – wonky corners, not quite straight lines, and angles askew.   A failed attempt at control and discipline, but also an attempt at creating a space for quiet and calm.