Liminal Spaces and Guardian Spirits

Bridget Simons and Jill Joubert

Main Gallery: 22.08.2024 -03.10.2024

Bridget Simons

In the oil paintings that constituted the body of work submitted for my M.F.A. degree, I explored the liminal spaces of daydreaming. My interest in emotional liminal spaces continues in my current creative work, in watercolour on paper and oil on board.

The sea is the focus of most of my paintings in that it is a quintessential liminal space: The sea symbolises the unknown and has become synonymous with the ongoing refugee crisis. The 'in-between' status of refugees and migrants embodies liminality and, as such, my work includes references to the current refugee crisis and migration in general.

Given that migration has been a feature of human existence worldwide for millennia, I overlay references to many eras and cultures in much of my work. Migration is difficult on many levels, none the least of which is navigation. It is difficult to cross the open ocean, or indeed the land, with no navigational instruments or the skill to read maps. To highlight the problems of navigation, I use a range of obscure or little-known maps in my paintings, from star charts to ancient Islamic maps and the stick charts unique to the indigenes of the Marshall Islands.

The scale of most of my paintings is intimate, with a view to invite private engagement with each work. To evoke the feeling of disorientation intrinsic to liminal spaces, I use abstraction in some paintings and use both aerial and eye-level perspectives, solid shapes and outlines. Because the square has no orientation, I use the square format to suggest stability, calm and timelessness to counter the turmoil engendered by current unprecedented global challenges.

Life today feels like a frighteningly liminal space, but liminal spaces often herald positive growth.

Jill Joubert

My abiding interest in the deeper meaning of fairy tales, creation stories and mythologies across many cultures is reflected in the title I gave my MA dissertation: Apple Girl: Ingesting and Transforming Apple Girl from Fairy Tales into Sculpture and Performance. Since Apple Girl, (2013) I have worked on and performed three subsequent puppet plays.

I also work in figurative sculpture that reflects my puppets in their otherworldly forms and sometimes moving, jointed parts. Conceived through the properties of wood and found objects such as bone, beads, bits of fur, metal, and other discarded objects, the hybrid wooden figures evoke spirit beings that exist in a liminal space, part human, part animal, often with androgynous sexualities. I source wood from felled trees and roots, whose shapes suggest the transformed characters they will become.

My work fuses and reflects diverse iconographies drawn from my inheritance of pre-Christian, Biblical, European, African, and Catholic sources. The embedded histories of recycled wood and found objects, often gifted to me by family and friends, link the past with the present and the spiritual with the material.

My spirit figures, re-fashioned from once seemingly dead and discarded materials, are symbolic of a deep longing for delight and hope in a chaotic and turbulent world.

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Liminal Spaces and Guardian Spirits

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