Denise Gawley

Standing in the After

“In my blood, through every fiber of my being, I float. Not all dark holes are spaces into nothingness. All holes hold something, as even nothing is something – like silence, the loudest noise of all. And would it even matter? When I look into the void of “The After” no matter the shape it assumes, I see the end and a beginning. The negative space falls into an un-namable place filled with vibrational excess. It is silence that moves. I contemplate the void with a tension that excites. What seems like endlessness is also finite as I move with a blindfold hoping to steal a peek of what lies within. Is it mine to shape or is it waiting for me to enter and assume that which is the void itself?
It is neither here nor there. It is nowhere, yet somewhere.
Attainable yet somehow unreachable. Real while also open to the imagination.
Shapeless yet bound. A shining light of blackness.
Clear yet distorted. Silent and loud.
Presence without object.” – Denise Gawley

My apophatic art project will center on the question of what it means to stand with the after of my doctoral dissertation and subsequent time of professional and personal transition. Rather than asking what comes next, I will create a series of abstract watercolors and photography that will confront the potentiality of the unknown as seen through saturated voids that resist certainty, structure, and resolution.

My project will engage in not-knowing as a disciplined practice, allowing meaning to emerge through absence and fragmentation. I will seek to embody and embrace this place of vulnerability and becoming rather than resist the pull toward finding answers and decision-making about the immediate future. I draw on Curt Cloninger’s understanding of apophatic visual practices in his book Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art (2021), where artworks (apparatuses) function as a tool that disrupt the production of meaning, creating conditions in which “nothing” can be encountered.

Watercolor in particular is the perfect medium for processing material events that resist control and intentional closure. The unstable flow of color and water is inherently unpredictable and often accidental – as is life itself. With watercolor I am also permitted to color within the proverbial lines in order to still satisfy my lingering desire for control.