Untitled (The Eel)

A Short Story by Chantel Ness

To say I came from Nothing would be an understatement. In fact, that’s pretty much the whole point of Everything that is to follow. I’d like to avoid jumping ahead prematurely at the risk of alienating you, or spoil the plot by giving away too much. So we should really begin at The Beginning. 

People always ask “where do your ideas come from” or “what’s your inspiration”?

To be honest, I’m just as confused as anyone else. Maybe even more so. The distressed and tortured artist stereotype doesn’t even begin to cover it. How would you feel if you had no memory or knowledge of your history? In some ways, it makes me proud to know that my ideas are wholly original. When you are the one who creates everything that creates everything, no critic would dare label you derivative. 

My arc itself is not unique, all artists follow the same trajectory: periods of exploration and experimentation, the constant refining of tastes, before ultimately finding “their voice”. 

***

At first, my oeuvre was purely conceptual and quite cerebral. I was a bit of a loner at this young stage of my career. I don’t say this to garner sympathy, I was relieved to be isolated with my thoughts. It helped protect the purity of my ideas. I wanted my visual lexicon to reflect a poetic sensibility.

I conceptualised components of all varieties coming together in infinite iterations. I called my first piece ‘Holism’. Elegance has always been an underlying theme for me. 

I explored the boundaries of minimalism - a fascinating challenge. How to produce the best possible piece with the fewest parts necessary? I titled it “The Paradox of Choice and the Freedom of Limitations.” I know art criticism is subjective, but it would be incorrect to read this piece as restrictive. Simplicity should never imply limited function! When you distill the core elements of a traditional practice, you can produce exquisitely complex works. A cleverly chosen palette should allow for timeless and endless permutations.

What followed next was a pretty groovy age of experimentation. All through my Force-Era, I was literally riding on vibrations and waves. Gravity was a trip, man. Persistent undulations, a rhythmic push and pull of attraction and repulsion. Sometimes known as “Laws”, I regard them as my established set of aesthetic principles. A vocabulary that I would use throughout my practice. My masterwork “The Grand Transmutation of Energy” from this period continues to resonate. 

Having emerged from a vast Nothingness, I was initially drawn to the Dark. It was my matériau-du-jour, my muse. It felt natural and familiar. An abyss so deep and black your mind is not equipped to comprehend. There was no depth perception and yet depth was the only perception. The presence of the composition was made palpable through its absence. I cannot properly describe how it felt to be consumed by this super-intense dark energy. 

I pondered how I might be able to further underscore the darkness, to honour it with contrast. I experimented with different ways to physically imbue my works with Light. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get overly-technical and bore you with my process. It was simply a graceful pairing of particles and antiparticles, of matter and antimatter. The moment I employed light in my work, I discovered something I hadn’t noticed before. I was inviting a new sort of perceptual encounter - the illusion of dimension! The French now call it ‘clair-obscur’, or from the Italians ‘chiaroscuro’. I wouldn’t realise the full realm of possibilities until much later. 

Though they were recognized posthumously, my “Stars” persist as a crowning achievement from my Light and Dark movement. I’m quite amused with the mythology and romanticism framing these enormous, churning and burning celestial bodies. It’s flattering to have your work appropriated and reinterpreted. 

There was dark, there was light. And so I was satisfied enough, for a time.

***

My discovery of dimension held some fascinating implications. These ideas might have remained theoretical, if not for a gift from the stars. Out of the swirling and glowing soup: elemental byproducts presented. Gases…metals…non-metals! The richness practically begged me to enter my 3D phase. I expressively and spontaneously drew from this newfound repertoire of materials and scattered them into cloud-like forms. 

From these clouds of dust, I started assembling. Using an invisible rotating spindle, I brought everything together in a thin disc. I then concentrated the rocky bits toward the hot centre where the spindle caused friction. I allowed the gas and lighter components to condense on the cooler perimeter. I wanted the work to inquire on the relationship between boundaries and contours as well as centres and peripheries. I made many discs. I hurled them at each other to see what would happen. Sometimes they’d break apart and sometimes they’d stick together. Depending on their size, I called them planets, moons, asteroids, comets or meteors. I decided their composition would be spatially related by mass and evocatively reference my earlier work with Gravity. I did this over and over. I got obsessed. I produced an immeasurable quantity, collection after collection. 

All this work is exhibited Universally, of course. I encourage you to view them should you get the chance. I sense you are most curious about my local pieces. From here, allow me to entertain you with tales from my Milky Way Residency. And yes, your solar system, and your planet specifically. It was a nifty bit of handiwork, and I’m not just pandering. I wanted my Inorganic work to be in dialogue with my yet-to-emerge field of Organics, but more on that later. 

Again, I was placated for a time, but I couldn’t help but feel this was all a bit superficial. This period for me... this filling up of space with stuff, felt inauthentic to my origins. I was veering toward maximalism. But how to express nothing? 

***

There I was on my own. No nepotism, no connections. If I was going to get discovered, I needed a break-through. When I talk about getting noticed, what I truly long for is to be seen and understood. I needed breadcrumbs. 

Evolution. I’m credited with being the first to use Time as a medium. I was charmed by the notion of experienced time and historicity. These constructs would imply directionality. Like an acute angle, a Less-Than-Sign. By seeing my whole body of work retrospectively, the curious could work backward from all the richness and variety and strip away the layers until they reveal my point of origin. I’ve heard many people call it “The Big Bang”. Oh how I loathe that title. Can’t they understand that I left it untitled on purpose? Maybe if they can figure out where I came from, I’ll finally know peace. 

Evolution was huge turning point for me. My most dynamic body of work had emerged. The more I produced, the more complex my creations became over time. One cell became two. I was improving my craft. Complex cellular organisms became Arthropods. The wild fervour of entropy, chance and chaos. Marine life, land plants, insects and seeds. This period was brief but prolific and unbridled. Amphibians, reptiles, I was creating my most original and varied works. My landscapes! My florals! For a while I felt as though my creativity knew no bounds.

If only that feeling could last forever. The life of an artist has its ups and downs. One problem with evolution, it makes your tastes so fickle! Precariously building on constantly shifting sand presents confusion and doubt. I can name three distinct times my career suffered complete and utter meltdowns: 

The first time, I was just naïve and inexperienced - I made things too hot, overdid it with the CO2 and was fairly heavy-handed with the methane. At the time I thought the work was really good! It's embarrassing to look back on that earlier stuff now. To think, I considered ocean acidification “edgy”, what a naïve punk. 

The second time happened so gradually I barely even noticed. I was simply toiling away, putting in the work, not realising I was growing despondent and uninspired. Self-doubt clouded my mind…was my work even good anymore? Is the use of fractals lazy, or cool? Everything read cliché and I started to feel like a parody of myself. I was washed up. It took all those volcanoes erupting to really snap me out of it. When I finally did, I conceded to throwing out the whole lot. 

The third time's a funny story. Everywhere I go, people want to ask me about the Dinosaurs. What happened to the Dinosaurs, they say. We loved your Jurassic Period! This work initially emerged from my desire to combine the compositional hierarchy of evolution with the consumerist vernacular of mass-appeal. That’s how my intentions started out at least, but here’s the honest truth. When something gets too popular, don’t you ever get the urge to just burn it all down? That cringe feeling when your dad starts using the word “lit”. I’m not sure what this says about me. Pretentious? Maybe. I just thought it would be so Dadaist and absurd to send in that asteroid. And still! As much as I try to escape this period and be seen as a “serious artist” it's crazy how this Pop stuff pervades. Still today. 

***

Even with all the commercial success I was unfulfilled. I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling - the trauma of my unknown origin. As artists, we ultimately experiment and create works in the hope of understanding ourselves. When you are too close to the Work it’s almost impossible. 

I needed to make something that could answer my questions. Holding up a mirror is so uninspired, but it’s the only way I could think to go about it. The Self-Portrait. That’s when I started to incorporate meta-consciousness as a formal device. That’s when I started to experiment with you. 

Throughout my career I’ve relied on symbolism as a means of expression. For the longest time, it was the only language I knew - the language of analogy. Your pioneers  - the Stone Agers, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians - they all relied heavily on symbolism. Image, identity, language - all constructed and deconstructed through a lyrical use of symbols. I was really the one who started that whole trend. 

Even in my earliest sketches of you, I layered in tools for investigation - symbols, myths, religious systems. I found my voice by giving you one. Still considered to be one of the most important collaborations, it was all very meta. I prompted you to contemplate your own versions of the truth. I wanted to give you opportunities to interrogate meaning. I created riddles for you. I created mysteries for you. For you, I created the Eel. 

***

The work was conceived from a desire to create something puzzling and unexpected. 

A work so complex and witty and layered! So metaphorically ripe. To start, I would use no reproductive organs, no eggs. Eels would have no observable mating rituals. No fission, no fragmentation, no budding, no spores. I would completely obscure their origin. Since eels were unaccountable to you, the mystery deepened, you took the bait. 

Since ancient times, this enigmatic creation has consumed you. Like me, they appeared to materialise from nothing. Myth arises from things we cannot comprehend. Ancient Egyptians decided eels were born when the sun warmed the waters of the Nile. Aristotle determined they appeared impromptu, out from the mud and rain. Native elders believed old eels rubbed their bodies on rocks, splitting off into new eels. Lore had them emerging from beetles, from sea-foam, from dew and one of my favourites: when a hair from a horse's tail lands in water. You mummified them. You deified them. 

I created a work so slippery and elusive it would transform dramatically through its life cycle. A metamorphosis in four acts: the tiny larva with oversized eyes floating naively in the vast ocean, the translucent glassy tube navigating coastlines and rivers with determination, the yellow-brown fish travelling across dry land and hibernating in pond mud, and the silver eel circumnavigating to the Bermuda Triangle, to a sea within the Sargasso Sea. 

I had them idle in the pond mud arbitrarily before returning to the sea - sometimes five years, sometimes fifty, sometimes indefinitely. I made them wiggle in your frying pans, appearing to evade death. It seemed to be forever unsolvable. Behind any eel answer there was always another eel question. Luckily, you are curious by design. Slowly and with tenacity, you are working out the truth. I gave you one final complication as a caution. As you find yourselves on the eve of enlightenment, my Eel is on the eve of extinction. There is so much to be learned from how little you know. 

As a relatively young mind on a relatively young planet in a relatively young galaxy, I do not expect you to have immediate answers. What use is a riddle if it’s obvious? I simply implore you to keep sketching, keep refining, that someday down the road you may finish my Self Portrait. 

***

People always ask “where do your ideas come from”?

Where do I come from? Am I an idea?

Like an idea, my presence was seeded by your deep thoughts, your gathered data. In your consciousness I have marinated and slowly simmered. Your mind formed new and deepening connections. I germinated in your collective garden. As your conscious mind wandered, I engaged your unconscious in a playful matching game, pulling together diverse influences and experiences. Insights bubbled up from the sub-layers of your mind and broke through into Awareness. Seemingly out of nowhere, I present. 

From nothing I created everything and Everything is in Nothing. The entire richness of the drama of life exists in this nothing.