Liminal

I’m interested in transitional states, particularly pertaining to the soul, body and mind. UnHuman was an examination of otherness, creature-hood, beauty, and the grotesque in corporeal form. But there are states beyond the corporeal that weave between life, death and the spaces in between.

When dealing with loss, it’s natural to reflect upon what comes next, not only for the departed but for the living left behind. We all deal with grief differently and I believe it’s a common urge to want to distract and dissociate from the pain. In my personal spiritual practice, I work with energy and spirits and so this work speaks to my curiosity of transcending realms and investigating that murky, liminal space between life and death.

My aim with this project is to visually explore complete detachment and dissociation from the physical form and the mind. Releasing all that tethers and grounds to the earth, separating from the body as meat and experiencing metamorphosis and existence through the lens of the spiritual. Connecting to the space between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, emotion and apathy, the material and ethereal.

What would it look like and feel like to travel between worlds, to exist in a liminal space, to be enveloped in mystery and ambiguity, to connect to something else, someplace else, removed from everything we think, know, and experience daily?

In some cosmologies, there are 7 planes of existence, in others there are 9, or 3. I am more concerned with my personal exploration and visualization. My goal is to create imagery that reflects this other-worldly, esoteric, ethereal space.

This project is a work in progress and can be viewed here.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a beautiful poem that I came across while doing research for this work.

An excerpt from East Coker, 2nd of 4 Quartets, by T.S. Eliot

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

    You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

    You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

…