Archive - August 2026

Artworks in Vantablack: void, emptiness and fertility

An exhibition of work by Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery in London features works in Vantablack – the blackest known substance in the world, a super-black nanomaterial that absorbs over 99.96% of visible light. There are shapes that seem to be void, with no sense of depth or perspective - they are rich, inviting and intriguing. Being present to these experiences inevitably and directly invites me to be with ‘what is’: I can’t impose or take for granted any of my own interpretations or assumptions. It reminds me that when I’m with a coaching client, I can’t and mustn’t take anything for granted about them, their perspectives or their interpretations. Far from viewing the void as nothingness, Kapoor sees it as pregnant emptiness - which brings to mind for me the Gestalt principle of the Fertile Void: John Leary-Joyce talks of ‘the paradox that someone or something could be simultaneously empty or full….. staying with the void of the ‘not knowing’ allowed the space and time for something new and amazing to emerge’.