echoes of shunya
My thesis, Nothingology: Flying to “Know-where”, grows from a simple but persistent question that has followed me since childhood: how does something come from nothing? My graduation work is the painted, physical side of that question. Together, the writing and the paintings explore nothingness not as a blank absence, but as a fertile, creative ground from which forms, colours, and even thoughts arise.
I work mostly in warm off‑white monochromes, building thin, translucent layers where forms slowly emerge and dissolve back into the ground. Circles, leaf‑like shapes, lines, and barely visible infinities hover at the edge of perception. Slowness is important: the works are meant to invite a state of calm attention, a kind of visual equivalent of the pause between breaths.
The thesis moves between Buddhist emptiness, Vedantic fullness, Sikh ideas of oneness, Western philosophy, and modern physics, but always returns to the same intuition: the ground of reality is neither a solid “thing” nor a simple nothing, but a dynamic field of relations. In the paintings, this becomes a practice of starting from the blank canvas as a “field of emptiness” and letting four recurring characters appear from it: creativity (organic, generative forms), interconnectivity (lines that divide and connect), the individual (dots and circles), and the infinite (here, held in restrained, almost colourless tones).
For anyone viewing the work, none of this theory is required as background. The works are not illustrations of philosophy; they are places to stand and feel. If you give them time, they may offer a quiet experience of fullness inside apparent emptiness: like noticing how much is happening in a surface that first looked like “almost nothing”. In that sense, my thesis and graduation work are an invitation to meet nothingness not as a void to fear, but as a gentle ground that receives, holds, and quietly creates.
