Colin Marshall of the Santa Barbara Independent talked to of William Davies King last week about his new book, Collections of Nothing. From broken folding chairs to soup labels, as Marshall writes, “King’s are collections of nothing, that is, things of no outward value.” Yet through the act of gathering, organizing, and displaying these objects, King finds them imbued with a deeply personal significance:

“It comes out of a 20th-century vocabulary of art, going back to Dadaism, which was an art that believed in nothing” King said. “My own education led me to the Dadaist artists and their strange, often outsider art that was alert to the idea that emptiness of meaning might be as expressive and ‘true’ as art that purports to be full of meaning. I searched for artwork that would express my own anxiety in the face of the modern world’s questionable values. I think anxiety takes the form of nothingness: it’s this strange void within you that never seems to get filled up.”

Read the article on the Santa Barbara Independent website. We have an excerpt from the book and an essay by the author.