Liminal Spaces

As the pandemic united the world in a state of suspended reality, so artists are just beginning to explore the facets of this taut interregnum: the sensory deprivations of quarantine; the advance of authoritarianism; the panacea of technology; the crisis of existentialism and the spirit of activism that marked the days. For any creative, finding synchronicity in duality, is essential to their oeuvre, and the void between often opposing ideas can be considered an almost magical tipping-point. The tension between past and present, origin and completion can be found throughout Tom Anholt’s work. In his new series ‘Back Garden’, Anholt has started to move from figuration towards a more abstract perspective - one which still powerfully evokes the beauty of an untamed garden. Faced with the stark ugliness of reality, Ian Davis approaches his work through a surreal lens revealing an eerily prescient dystopian universe that charts the follies of man through the use of repetition and flowing narratives. Rabia Farooqui, a trained Mughal miniaturist, explores the didactic tensions between traditional and modern techniques in her invitingly tactile work which concerns itself with the duality of the self and with navigating opposing states of being. For Emma Fineman, it is language that supplies the continuity necessary for excavating buried memories in a practice that spans painting, sculpture and monoprint, Arthur Lemaitre walks the line between reality and the imagined. This journey started while he was still a student in Paris, and his work is characterised by palimpsests of details which allow for a multitude of interpretations. ‘The sum gives meaning to all parts’, is Radu Oreian’s maxim for a practice that allows for the creation of pieces of ‘puzzles’ that fit into a larger narrative through the employment of classical techniques, recurrent details and the creation of a kind of suspended animation between the figurative and the abstract. The genesis of Hiroe Saeki’s powerful new works is the pursuit of a void which can paradoxically contain the past, present and the future. Conversely, it is the flower that is transformed into the symbol of life while for Waswo X. Waswo it is inquiries into identity, the ownership of practice and the question of belonging. Waswo’s status as an outsider (or interloper), being an American living in India, renders his quest a highly personal one.