Negative Capability
January 7th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Nina Canell, Nerve Variation, Heat Hang and Soft Stone
Nina Canell, Tapetum Lucidum (Blue Gas No.5)
Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile (40kg)
I love Nina Canell’s delicate and ephemeral sculptures. She favours flexible and ‘invisible’ materials in her work such as mist, dust, neon or electromagnetic energy to produce installations of non-finite forms. The materials often change from one state to another, they evaporate, harden, soften; imitating natural cycles of constant transformation.
‘Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’
(John Keats, Selected Letters)
