Everything/Nothing is a neon text installation created by artist and performance maker Tim Etchells, in response to Martha Graham’s seminal work Deep Song. Designed initially to be hung above the stage as the choreography is danced by Miki O’Hara for Dance On’s Response Project, the full text of Etchells’ work is a quotation from Federico García Lorca’s 1931 poem ‘Ay!’ reading simply: Everything in the world is broken. Nothing but silence remains.

Arranged as a constellation of neon words in dispersed arrangement above the stage Etchells’ work enters a porous dialogue with Graham’s choreography, the words illuminated one at a time to make a brief time-based intervention in the work, in which Lorca’s text haunts the air above and around the piece. In the gesture of bringing this particular text into dialogue with Deep Song, Etchells closes a circle of connection between the legacy of flamenco’s deep song, Graham’s powerful choreographic response to the Spanish Civil War, and Lorca himself who lost his life during the conflict. Placing fragmentary language, as individual words, in dialogue with Graham’s ambiguous choreography of a suffering female figure, Etchells’ neon directly addresses the concerns and context of the dance as well as acknowledging the limits of language when it comes to speaking of traumatic experience.

About Tim Etchells’ neon and LED works
Etchells’ neon and LED pieces often draw on his broader fascinations as an artist, writer and performance maker, exploring contradictory aspects of language – the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and at the same time its amazing propensity to create a rich field of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Through simple phrases spelt out in neon, LED and other media, Etchells strives to create miniature narratives, moments of confusion, awkwardness, reflection and intimacy in public and gallery settings. Encountering the neon sign works, in the streets of a city or in the space of a white cube gallery, the viewer becomes implicated in a situation that’s not fully revealed, or a linguistic formulation that generates confusion or ambiguity. As often in Etchells’ work, in the neons the missing parts of the picture are as important as the elements that are present. Invoking a story, or projecting an idea out-of-context, the work invites us in, but into what exactly we can’t be sure.