Liminal reformulates the photographic image as an encounter with a visual threshold that draws us into a series of twilight spaces, spaces not immediately visible, yet spaces that define and transcend the solitary image.
It presents a series of found objects photographed in their real world environments. These objects act as visual connectors, precipitating the viewer’s perception beyond the object itself into the indefinite space that envelops and defines it.
In contrast to conventional notions of the photograph as a stand-alone thing, existing within a visual field of other stand-alone things, Liminal explores how photography can experientially reveal the space beyond the photograph rather than simply documenting an object or bringing it to life. As Claire Colebrook notes, such a use of the image prompts us to look at the wider spatial field in which the image only forms a part:
“This is a different mode of sublimity, where the non-given extends to infinity…this makes a key difference to how we think first about the art object…it prompts us to recognise that the smallest details of the thing (such as the difference between a comma and a semi-colon) would generate a thousand or more…series…it entertains all the infinities that would unfold from the seemingly insignificant minutiae.”
In other words, it investigates how the photograph as an object and the object within a photograph, exist in a deeper field of visual relationships beyond the conventional field of vision. The photograph here operates as a threshold, triggering the viewer’s shift from a world of solitary objects to a world of open-ended situations, a world of interrelated spaces. This deeper field of spatial relationships can only be evoked, hence the optical ambiguity of the photographic objects in Liminal suspended in a digital chiaroscuro.