The Experience of Emptiness: A Creative Exploration of Indeterminacy

In an exploration of my own experience of being-in-the-world I produced five pieces of art which are meant to represent my relationships to my environment, with other beings, and the interplay between these interactions which constitute indeterminacy. Informed by readings of phenomenology, existentialism, and classic Chinese philosophy, specifically the Dao De Jing, I expressed my experience as a woman in the 21st century as I engaged in a constant reciprocity of viewing, watching, and self-surveilling. I expressed this experience through art because of art’s unique ability to parallel bodily experience in that it promotes the same exchange of power in the shifting of attention of the viewer from the work to the ways in which the art works on themselves, just as our perception functions as we move through the world with our horizons expanding and contracting, simultaneously constituting our surroundings and being constituted by our surroundings.