Sayoko Takahata
My PhD research investigates how contemporary painting practice informed by the Post-Impressionist movement of Pointillism can represent the presence of absence: the Japanese cultural concept of “Ma (間)”. “Ma” means gaps, intervals and void between something in terms of time and space. In Japanese paintings, it indicates negative space in response to the positive as a form which could potentially activate our senses and imaginations. This research aims to find how painting ‘something’ can communicate a phenomenon of ‘nothing’ or ‘no-thingness’ as the concept.
I intend to explore drawing as a way to record sensory experiences apart from thinking, focusing on optical, auditory and haptic perceptions and felt stimuli in the natural environment. This will form a springboard for painting which will evolve to examine potential models of the states of no-thingness as which I regard a sensory phenomenon to evoke something out from no-thingness. I will utilise painting dots as historical Pointillists seemed to depict optical phenomena of light impressions allowing visual colour mixtures.
New insight will be brought to contemporary painting practices in the creative arts and parallel theoretical fields. This research purposes to bridge the Western and Eastern perspectives on the presence of absence.