In the liminal

I follow a couple of chaps on TikTok that give out ‘advice’ for artists.  Sometimes I think, well that might work if you live in London, but here in the arse end of nowhere, that’s a different story and other times, I think yep  ‘toats’ agree…

One guy was talking about reducing institutionalised art speak for more realistic language when talking about your work and doing funding applications.  I was so nearly on board. You know how much I hate the interrogating, exploring, juxtaposing stuff. These words are so over used that often they don’t even truly relate to the work. But when he said to also drop the word ‘Liminal’ I could feel my eye begin to twitch, accompanied by an ‘over my dead body’.

Funny thing is that 24 months ago, liminal wasn’t even in my vocabulary.  I’d been reading some artist’s statements for inspiration and seen the word pop up a few times, so I googled the definition – And according to Merriam Webster it means “being in-between or on the threshold of two different states, places, or conditions” It comes from the Latin word līmen which means threshold or doorway, and I thought that is exactly where my work sits. Those moments when something is coming to a close but the new hasn’t quite arrived, a  bit like dusk, not quite daytime and not quite night-time. Well!  In fact, as it turns out, it’s the whole premise behind Portals Divine.

Ireland has a long, deep-rooted tradition of holding liminal spaces. Perhaps its geography has something to do with that. On one side there is mainland Britain, and on the other, the wild Atlantic Ocean. An island sitting at the western edge of Europe, where coastlines, forest edges, rivers, wells and bodies of water all become places of transition. And Irish mythology is full of thresholds too. Places and moments where this world and the Otherworld seem to draw particularly close.

But it’s also something more. My paternal Irish grandmother also lived in a liminal space.  She was agoraphobic and never left the house, but that didn’t stop her having regular conversations with those beyond the veil of this reality. And not in a mad-as-a-box-of-frogs way either. My dad has told countless stories of her encounters, and he’s had a fair few of his own.

It’s also how I work.

It’s not just the subjects that reflect this either. I also seem to occupy a liminal space between different states of consciousness, particularly when I’m painting. I can be completely absorbed in what I’m doing and yet somewhere else at the same time. Hours disappear, and the outside world becomes quieter. Decisions happen without me consciously thinking through every one of them…and perhaps that is why so much of the work only reveals itself to me afterwards.

I’ve talked before about symbols appearing in paintings before I fully understand why they are there. A horse becomes a witness,  a red thread connects one figure to another a halo becomes…well actually, I’m not even sure why that keeps appearing.

The point is that none of this begins with me sitting down with a notebook and deciding what everything is going to mean. If I did that, I suspect I’d kill the bloody thing before I'd even put paint on the canvas. In the meantime though, I’m keeping the word liminal, because that word has definitely earned its place in my vocabulary.

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