Nil by page

Words give us a world to play with, manipulate and even take away. In 1975, Mexican artist Ulises Carrión declared that: 'The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages.' On the surface, this statement could be dismissed as the nonsensical rantings of a creative; however, if you dig deeper, it becomes apparent that he was alluding to everything that gets lost between concept and execution and the symbolic refusal to compromise authorial vision. The absence instantiated by the blank page is inherently ambiguous. After all, it is a materialisation of both nothingness and infinity, oscillating between the two. Anglo-French writer Andrew Gallix discusses the use of blank pages throughout literature, including how male writers express creative dilemmas. In contrast, female authors exploit them to demonstrate how women have been defined in the patriarchy as a blank slate.