What is the element of art that deals with the area between around below and within a subject matter?

Welcome to the sixth piece in our Seven Elements of Art series, in which Kristin Farr matches videos from KQED Art School with work from The Times to help students make connections between formal art instruction and our daily visual culture.

Here are the other lessons in the series: shape, form, line, color, texture and value.

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How does the transformation of space support communication of an artist’s intentions?

Space is the area in which an artwork is organized, and encompasses both what is inside and what is immediately outside, or around, the work. Space can be filled on a page, a canvas, in a room or outdoors, and it is inherent in any physical artwork.

The use of space and the way it is transformed play a role in conveying a creative message. To begin to understand this element, watch the video at the top of this post. Then practice exploring it further with the five ideas below.

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1. Two-Dimensional Works and the Element of Space

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After you’ve watched the video at the top of this post, try finding some of the elements you learned about by looking through just one collection of images, The Times’s Year in Illustration 2017.

For example, Antonio De Luca, a Times art director, said about the image above, “Jody Barton’s drawing uses the desktop’s white negative space to extend the artwork’s narrative.” How? How does the image contribute to the ideas in the article?

Which of the other pieces in the collection use the element of space in interesting ways? How?

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2. Site-Specific Artwork

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Site-specific art is created for one particular space and can’t be realized in the same way anywhere else. Artists build immersive environments and structures of many different scales to create site-specific artwork.

The British sculptor Anish Kapoor evokes emotional reactions through his use of space, filling and transforming it to create an immersive experience. For example, “Memory,” the work pictured above, is described by the Times critic Ken Johnson this way:

The Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum consists of just one work, but it’s a doozy. Viewable only from three partial perspectives, “Memory” is an enormous egg-shaped volume of Cor-Ten steel, wedged into a boxy side gallery like a dirigible that drifted off course and got stuck.

When you approach it from the gallery’s main entryway, all you see is a curved, heavily ribbed section, its rusty, flanged parts held together by heavy bolts. It evidently fills the gallery from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. But you cannot enter this way, so you go around through rooms holding the permanent collection and enter a dimly lighted space with a square hole in the wall. From the side you can see steel plates sloping away from the edges of this aperture, but from straight on only an ambiguous blackness is visible. It could be paint on a wall or a window onto endless night. But you understand that you are looking into the pitch-black interior of the sculpture, and since you can’t see more than a few feet of the inner surface, the space seems limitless, as in the light and space works of James Turrell, only dark.

Mr. Johnson goes on to describe his own emotional response to this fabricated dark void.

More poetically, the idea of memory — or, perhaps more appropriately, amnesia — is evoked by the nearly absolute darkness and seeming limitlessness of its interior. It could be read it as a cosmic space into which all individual and collective memories eventually disappear, like raindrops falling into the ocean.

How do Anish Kapoor and other artists use scale and space to evoke feelings of memory? View the Times slide show of more sculptures by Mr. Kapoor and notice how he plays with depth and fills space in different ways. Remember: In sculpture, positive space is the area the objects occupy, and negative space is the areas between and around.

• What are your immediate thoughts and reactions to these artworks?

• How does Mr. Kapoor juxtapose the positive and negative, both emotionally and physically, with the use of color and dimension?

The German painter Katharina Grosse is another artist who takes on large-scale space, pushing paint and pigment beyond flat, two-dimensional space and into three dimensions. She often covers geometric forms with pigment, and she painted an entire abandoned military structure at the Rockaways in Queens using an industrial paint sprayer.

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In “A Fiery Splash in the Rockaways and Twists on Film at the Whitney,” the Times writer Robin Pogrebin quotes the curator Klaes Biesenbach as he describes this special project:

“Here’s a very beautiful found object,” said Mr. Biesenbach, who has a house in the Rockaways. “It has history as being a military fortress, as being ecologically changed because of the hurricane. Now it’s being restored to its natural habitat.”

The site-specific artwork by Ms. Grosse was only temporary and part of a restoration project after Hurricane Sandy that would soon see the dilapidated building torn down — but not before the artist turned it into a sunset-colored surreal artwork. View MoMA’s video below about this project and see the building before and after Ms. Grosse painted it.

How was the space transformed from its previous aesthetic? The layers and history of a building create meaning and a forced dialogue. How does the artist emphasize the space and its history in this project?

The French artist JR is known for his large-scale photographic wheat-pasted works on buildings, bridges and other massive structures. See the Times slide show “‘Unframed,’ a JR Installation on Ellis Island” for more images of his artwork in multiple rooms of the historic and derelict hospital.

For a site-specific project on Ellis Island, he juxtaposed archival images of immigrants with the layered history of the island’s Immigrant Hospital. Using figures who have come back from the past to reinhabit a space, JR increased their scale, emphasizing the lives and history of the 12 million people who passed through Ellis Island. And for a piece at the United States-Mexico border, a photo of a little boy with dark hair and curious eyes peers carefully over the barrier wall that separates Tecate, Mexico, from San Diego County. Rising up almost 70 feet, his hands seemingly grip the barrier tightly, as if he were holding onto his mother’s body.

As you read about and look at these pieces, consider how site specificity, the creation of an artwork for a particular space, affects its message.

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3. Land Art

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Ugo Rondinone’s “Seven Magic Mountains” installation could be considered both site-specific art and land art (also know as earth art or earthworks). Land art is a movement that is naturally site-specific because it is integrated into outdoor environments. Mr. Rondinone made an installation in the desert of Las Vegas, which was labeled Pop Land Art by his partner, the writer John Giorno. Juxtaposing natural earth tones with towering, fluorescent-colored rock formations, Mr. Rondinone had to contend with the vast open space of the desert, as he explained in this 2016 article, “Building an Artist’s ‘Magic Mountains’ to Draw Visitors to The Desert.”

His original intention, he said, had been something a bit more humble in the landscape, cone-shaped piles of stones instead of the irregular, almost teetering columns he eventually conceived, inspired by natural hoodoo rock formations in Utah. “But then I realized that size doesn’t mean anything out here,” said Mr. Rondinone, 51, who was raised in the Swiss resort town of Brunnen and lives and works in Harlem. “The scale makes everything look small. That’s what you quickly figure out in the desert.”

The article goes on to describe Mr. Rondinone’s attitude about the sustainability of the artwork in its original, pristine form: “He said he welcomed whatever the desert would do to the pieces over the next two years. The erosion, fading and dirt would become part of the works.”

Land art can be considered a collaboration with the environment, gaining a “patina” of wear and tear by weather and the elements. Some artists see this process as a record of time passing, of the space surrounding the artwork moving in to reclaim its territory. Artists often consider the space in which the artwork is placed, as well as the context of the surrounding area.

One of the best-known works of land art is “Spiral Jetty,” a “huge curlicue of black basalt rock” built by Robert Smithson in 1970, and named an official state work by Utah in 2017.

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The piece was submerged for many years after its construction as lake water rose but has been visible again since about 2002. In a 2004 article, The Times reflected on how time and nature had affected the piece:

For nearly three decades Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” lay underwater in the Great Salt Lake. Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this famous American earth sculpture — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly re-emerged. Now it is completely exposed; the rocks encrusted with white salt crystals are surrounded by shallow pink water in what looks like a vast snow field.

In 1970, when Smithson built the “Jetty,” which is considered his masterpiece, the giant black coil contrasted starkly with the dark pink water of the lake. But time and nature have left their marks.

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4. A Times Scavenger Hunt

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Now that you’ve explored how space is used to communicate and emphasize intentions, and gained an understanding of site-specific art and the land art movement, browse through features in the New York Times Art & Design section — or elsewhere on NYTimes.com — and challenge yourself to a scavenger hunt. For example, how does the work of Yayoi Kusama, some of which is pictured above, play with the element of space?

As you look at a variety of Times images, see if you can find some with the following characteristics:

• A three-dimensional sculptural artwork that fills a space.

• A two-dimensional painting or photograph that emphasizes positive and negative space.

• A two-dimensional painting or drawing that gives the strong illusion of three-dimensional space, and an explanation for how this is achieved.

• An image of an artwork that could be considered site-specific.

• A two-dimensional painting or photograph in which the composition fills the space completely.

• An example of land art.

• An image in The Times in which the use of space could be described using one of these words: “dense”; “open”; “cluttered”; “symmetrical”; “shallow”; and “flat.”

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5. Your Turn: Site-Specific and Land Art of Your Own

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Inspired by the site-specific and land art examples above? Although yours will not likely be as monumental as “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” the installation pictured above, we have some ideas:

a. Create a site-specific work.

Using only found objects, such as recycled materials, or anything you can collect, choose a specific space in which to arrange the objects in an intentional and artful way. Consider the space your objects sit in, and the space immediately around them. How can you convey a message through the way these items are placed in their environment?

Try to create a message with your installation, thinking carefully about your location and how it speaks to the objects you are placing within it. Ask friends to “read” or critique your artwork, and document your project from different angles. Review your images and decide which angle best supports the success of your installation. Finally, try rearranging the objects to create a different message.

b. Create a work of land art.

Stretch a string across a basketball court or along a path. Cover the string completely with pebbles, bark, leaves or other natural materials (ones that aren’t attached to the earth).

Where does your path of material begin and end, and how does that contribute to the context of your new land art piece? What feeling do your chosen materials evoke? From balancing rocks to creating forts on the beach, land art is an easy and expansive way to experiment with space and natural materials.

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Want to read the whole series? Here are our lessons on shape, form, line, color, texture and value. How do you teach these elements?