In 2010, Elizabeth Newman exhibited a work called 1988, a brown envelope (propped up on a log), on the lower left hand corner of which ‘Derrida’ is written. The piece can be seen as emblematic of the concerns of much of her work of the last decade or so. Containing Newman’s study notes from a course in continental philosophy she took many years before, the humble brown envelope is charged with a suggestion of meaning. Yet its presumably profound (or at least complex) contents are hidden from us; what we are actually presented with, teasingly, is nothing but a blank surface. The work seems almost didactic in its illustration of Newman’s idea of art as concerning ‘something not seen but nevertheless present’.