Amongst the sensual discoveries in NºC, Hussein Chalayan chose four pencil illustrations from gallerist and art critic Sophie Arkette, from her series ‘Tacit Urns’ - commissioned especially for the the issue in 2002 as a series of 22 drawings.

Each illustration depicts a vase (as insinuated by the title pun on the word ‘taciturn’ and tacit ‘urns’) labeled with a different type of silence. Read below as Sophie unfolds her philosophical monologue on her study of silence and the works of other distinguished minds.

Above: “CONTAINS HABITUAL SILENCE”.

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TACIT URNS, by Sophie Arkette

What is silence? A premature response may be to describe silence as the absence of sound, an empty receptacle. But it is possible to experience total sensory deprivation and be still living? When John Cage entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard he wanted to know what pure silence was like, but he was, instead, confronted by two audible frequencies: those of his nervous system and blood circulation.

Subsequently, ans as a response to this experience, Cage wrote 4’33″, a musical piece notable for it’s absence of intentional musical material, celebrating instead the presence of incidental environmental sound: the scrape of a chair, s cough, the doppler effect of a passing train, the slow decay of the sound of a closing door; all framed within a duration of a clock time, rather than ordered metronomically.

Giving form to these urns or vases (pictured here) can be seen as a tribute to the richness of silent modality: Quaker silence, Trappist silence, Ezra Pound’s fall into quiet repose, the mute comedy of Harpo Marx, a silent understanding between patient and psychotherapist, silence as voodoo, silence as self preservation, silence as indicator of further levels of communication, the right to remain silent, a respectful one minute silence, the delineation between language and metaphysics so described by Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 1961) ‘…what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Silence, in our culture, has become a rare commodity. Urban sound intrusion is continually eroding sanctuaries of silence: the church and library. We must now pay a high price to gain the privilege of living in a quiet district. Are we ashamed of silence? Must we cover its nakedness with garments of sound? Perhaps at some future date when silence has expelled its last breath an entrepreneur will seize the opportunity to market bottled silence. Perhaps.

Above: “CONTAINS PURIFIED SILENCE”.

Above: “100% PURE SILENCE”.

Above: “HIGHLY COMBUSTIBLE SILENCE”.