The Implicate Order


Nellie Castan Gallery, 2013





Lamont Young- Implicate Order,

Digital Print , 2013




Lamont Young- Explicate Order,

Digital Print , 2013




These works are derived from a constellation of thoughts to do with the notion of wholeness and the implicate order explored by physicist David Bohm in his text of the same name. In that book the central underlying theme is the unbroken wholeness of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders. His text conceives a reality of space and matter, thoughts and things entire, rather than a realm of separate entities. The large screen works are plays on these ideas, merging measure and language with reflection and shadow. Bohm imagines a reality that is explicate, unfolded, from a far greater implicate order, a plenum of immense oceanic energy:

In the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space and time. So whatever part, element, or aspect we may abstract in thought, this still enfolds the whole and is therefore intrinsically related to the totality from which it has been abstracted.(1)

Into this reading I have also enfolded a memory of a dream that, for me as a younger person in my late teens, questioned the materialist view of experience. The dream occurred the day or night of my grandfather’s death and involved him and me in a scene of reconciliation. The dream was highly lucid and was significant because he died that day, a fact I was unaware of, having not spoken to him for many years. The words Everything will be Alright were what he said to me at the conclusion of the dream. I learned later that these were the last words he spoke before he died. The small table is one of the few remaining things I possess made by Lamont Young- my maternal grandfather. The table is an intricate piece of woodwork that has the most elegant wooden spring system enabling the table to be folded or unfolded for use.

These things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum in which they are generated and sustained and into which they must ultimately vanish.(2)

1. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,  1980, p 173

2. Bohm, Ibid, 147



© 2023 by Leslie Eastman