The shape of emptiness

For this assignment, I drew inspiration from the works of Matthew Simmonds. His method of shaping emptiness by subtracting material rather than adding to it fascinated me, serving as my starting point. I also pondered over Rubin's vase optical illusion, where one questions what is empty and what is full.

My concept revolved around creating two pillars where the form exists within the void between them. The true shape emerges only when the pillars are placed side by side and rotated to align the correct parts or create a new composition. To select the shapes, I thought about how I perceive emptiness. With three interpretations in mind, I crafted triangular pillars to represent each perspective:
Emptiness, as the absence of thoughts, was best expressed as the moment just before falling asleep, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. Symbolizing this, I depicted the outline of an empty head with the sun and moon, signifying the transition from day to night, wakefulness to dreaming, with half-closed eyes.
For emptiness as the absence of emotions, I chose a heart surrounded by emptiness. Here, emptiness felt negative, like being trapped in a void that pulls you downward. In my design, the void appears to tug the heart downward.
The final form represents the physical sensation of emptiness when submerged underwater. The lower empty triangle symbolizes water in alchemy, while the upper filled triangle with a line through it represents air. On the side of air, the body is depicted normally, but on the water side, it seems to lose its form and merge with the water.

After crafting the pillars, the maquette was painted entirely black, and a black circle was placed underneath, creating the illusion of the maquette disappearing into the background when viewed from above, leaving only light and shadow visible. What seems to be the object is, in fact, the emptiness. This raises questions about when emptiness takes form and when form becomes empty. Additionally, the transition from the maquette's 3D to the shadow's 2D is fascinating.