Empty Sculpture

Empty Sculpture

Mikala Dwyer’s Empty Sculpture attempts to make air visible, to capture something that is all around us, but we cannot usually see. The large-scale suspended plastic bubble traps air and reflects light, encouraging us to acknowledge the invisible substances all around.

Originally commissioned as part of Dwyer’s project Earthcraft, where it was suspended from an eight-metre-high ceiling in the Len Lye Centre’s Lower Ramp, the work responds directly to the beyond-human scale of the building. In Earthcraft, Dwyer combined geometric forms, materials and symbols, incorporating readymade objects and industrial materials alongside handmade and organic forms. Viewers must alter their path along a narrow straight space to avoid mobile-like arrangements hanging in space. This arrangement of forms, typical of Dwyer’s practice, poses questions about fiction and reality, time and space, and the mythologies people devise to make sense of the world.

Moulded forms like Empty Sculpture have appeared in Dwyer’s practice since 2002. Made from heated, vacuum-formed plastic, they take on a range of shapes and forms, and have appeared in a wide range of contexts—sometimes hanging, sometimes perched on the floor, sometimes even filled with soil and growing plants. Dwyer is reluctant to pin down any meaning or singular reading of the forms, but, as Robert Leonard noted, the shapes reference a history of sculptors manipulating matter to reduce the mass of an object and expand its volume as much as a space would allow—Fred Sandback’s lines of string, for instance. Inchoate and suggestive, they play upon a range of binary oppositions, floating in a zone between lightness and weight, artificial and organic.

— Simon Gennard, 2022