matzine

This week’s Editor’s Choice is taken from Matzine 06, “The Construc[tive] Critique”.

Kirstin Norwood work ‘Gaps‘ shows her micro sculpture accompanied by an extract from  6th century text Tao Te Ching  written by Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu.

“The sculpture itself,consists of three elements; a magnet, blade and nylon thread. The blade is tethered back from the magnet by the thread and thus is only barely touching the magnetic field produced by the magnet.”

For me this image captures the invisible as much as the visible. There are forces at work beyond our visual perception and it is precisely what’s not there, what we are not told, which creates an intensity, a tension and a stillness.

The words of Lao Tzu remind us of those moments ‘when absence can be the most emphatic form of presence.’ [MINIMALISMS, Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, Javier Rodriguez Marcos : Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2000.]

In current culture which is suffering withdrawal from an excess and superfluity,  where the tendency is to attribute value to tangible commodities, I find this image particularly poignant.

Perhaps we, as architects, thinkers and makers, might glean from this composition, less about what we might choose to do, and more about what we might choose not to.

Rowan Mackinnon-Pryde