THIS SITE WAS MADE FOR DESKTOP. ON MOBILE ZOOM FOR DETAIL.
six
SIX
2022
SIX, 2022
Collected soot
Glass box
6x6cm
Installed for SESSIONS, 2022 at 196 Victoria in Cape Town
SIX (2022) is a glass box containing 6 cubic cm of harvested soot.
Carbon is a cosmic element, a product of burning helium. It is abundant, structural, integral; a primary component of all life and the knife’s edge, on which we now sit. Though famously crystalline, amorphous carbon has no discernible molecular structure. It is without form – it is formless. And as soot, in its deep blackness, soft and powdery, reflecting little light, it becomes like void. I have slowly harvested, processed, refined, weighed and packed this void into a cube.
Enclosed, held in the hand, it is a dot, a pixel, a bud, a seed, a source, a point from which the universe can unfurl.
“Anything which moves beyond the event horizon of a back hole is lost to the universe. Theoretically, that information could emerge at an extreme future date via Hawking radiation, scrambled and in pieces of photons, to be reconstructed by a future civilisation.
Except it would be like trying to rebuild a house after a fire, from all the soot and ash.”
Drs Netta Engelhardt and Janna Levin,
on the Information Paradox.
Infinite Monkey Cage,
ep. Black Holes, 2022.
The formation of soot is a complex process, an evolution of matter in which a number of molecules undergo many physical and chemical reactions within milliseconds.
Omidvarborna; et al. (2015).
"Recent studies on soot modelling for diesel combustion"
Soot formation
Soot Embers
Soot Collection for Six (2022)
“The pigment is so deep it looks impenetrable and at the same time, illusorily infinite, as if it is the border to something vast; reaching your hand in and disappearing up to the elbow. It looks like a portal, when arranged flat on a surface. Is each tiny particle a fragment of the portal? The wind picks up. Ah, you’ve got portal all over everything again!
I think it will eventually tell me why I must collect it. I sense it searching for loose representations. It holds an answer inside of itself, buried in the dark of it pooled in the yoghurt container.”
Notes on collecting, Jess Sutherland, 2022.
