Piece Missing

When I was at TAFE in the mid-90s, learning the various crafts of art-making, I made sculpture called “Piece Missing”. It was an anomally.

The classes were things like Objective Drawing, Experimental Drawing, Life Drawing, Painting, Colour Theory, Printmaking etc. For the final assessment we were expected to present almost the amount of work you would do if you were making a piece of work every class - not every course, every class. And we had multiple classes per day. That’s a lot of work.

But still, I made an extra piece of work and submitted it. It was a strange sculpture that came out of nowhere, apparently. It was and ugly geometric lump made out of plaster and painted black. It was essentially a conceptual work and the explanation was something like this:

Piece Missing
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When we make an artwork we're bringing something into the world that didn't previously exist. How can this be? All we're really doing is re-arranging materials that exist in the world already. Where does this new thing come from? In what sense is it new? This work is not a new thing, it is the negative space, an absense of that new thing which hasn't yet been made. This work is the universe wrapping itself around the shape of something new which doesn't yet exist.

So there you go. In my first year of learning how to make art since I left school, I was handing in a sculpture that was claiming to be the whole universe. Really, I was asking the question “How is it possible to create something new?” and this is still the question I’m asking.