As a visual artist I am concerned that we, in the West at any rate, must use shadow to delimit the boundaries of form. Leonardo da Vinci wrote:
Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

From this perspective we can look at Shadow as the dark matter of composition, without any value judgment of positive and negative space. I now use a laser beam to probe the space between the elements of a still-life. We might seek to reveal a true duality of trace and outline.