Jan Turner

Nothing is Something - Jan Turner's Third Space

Space can be said to be a kind of substance that is everywhere. It can also be said that space is the spatial relation between bodies and bodies, forms and states, subjects and subjectivities. We understand empty space as nothingness among material things. But nothing is always something. The current scientific view is that nothingness does not actually exist because any void is full of quantum fluctuations generating continuously atomic particles from the vacuum energy that permeates the entire universe. Empty gaps are filled with something that has energetic properties. So nothing exists.
For Jan Turner, empty space is nothing with its own matter, which he shapes and animates. Not only material forms, but also the void between them has a sculptural quality for him. The void beckons with its depth and elasticity, how easily it can expand and contract, distort and shake. We know that emptiness is a condition for positive form, but we don't often think about the fact that nothing is itself also plastic and vibrating. As a vast empty boundary between material entities, nothingness provides a full space for the communication of forms, formats and molecules that must reconcile the gaps between them as a shared territory.

Jan Turner created two material objects to model the empty space between them. In other words, he makes something out of nothing, integrating the visible with the invisible, being with nothingness, the negative with the positive. And in doing so, he combines the male and female contours of the body, Olga with Francis.
If material things appear to us as compact and dense, more or less stable, empty space is a sparse interval of infinite permeability and dynamism. It gives rise not only to the activation of any form, but also to a multiplicity of intersubjective stories and experiences, which Jan Turner alludes to by using the shape of the torso. The torso has served for centuries as an artistic metaphor for the deepest spiritual and emotional qualities. Like the trunk of the body, the torso includes the heart and lungs and the organs of digestion and sex. It is the seat of intuition and feeling in the stomach, erotic desire and love, hunger and pride. The torso is the bodily space of many internal happenings, but the author draws attention to the happenings between bodies. What he calls the "third space" is the interactional distance between human beings. It is a void full of possibilities, a complex and volatile network of relationships between individuals, an expanded sense of felt interplay with the other.

The shaping of nothingness raises many questions: which is more important, what is there or what is not? Is nothingness itself an entity or just a relationship between entities? Does the void connect things or separate them? What is the essence of form, negative or positive space? Is sculpture out of air possible? Can we perceive unoccupied space as a medium, as a language? Can we focus on nothing?

Anetta Mona Chișa

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