NOTHING TO SAY #4

Nothing is … multitudes

by Ronan Lunney, Two Digs

When Daisy Chain asked me to visualise ‘NOTHING’, I came up against a philosophical question. What is nothing? And more importantly, what does it look like? If it was a circle, is it an empty circle, or a full one? Do they both visualise nothing or does the circle itself make it something?

I pondered that thought for some time and concluded that really, nothing is never really nothing — everything we do has intention or purpose. Nothing — at least to me — is always something.

If we decide that today, “We will do nothing!”, we might read a book, draw, or sit and doom scroll until we’re too tired to do anything “productive” — but no matter what, something has happened. With this mindset, it became clear that nothing is more like an imaginary construct that can have positive and negative connotations — and each person’s concept of nothing will be unique.

From this perspective, I decided to try and visualise nothing as more of a feeling.

Going back to the circle either being full or empty, I used this as my graphical base and began creating marks and textures while thinking about nothing. I just did. I used many mediums such as paint, charcoal, ink and pencil to create numerous unique circular marks, to represent many different intentions in a hope to convey something visually meaningful.

The process produced many marks all of which felt suitable — and I wanted to use them all. I felt that ‘NOTHING’ couldn’t be summed up in one mark. In most branding concepts, we strive to create one consistent visual — one core symbol to remember. However just like the word nothing, ‘NOTHING’ as a construct contains multitudes.