Abstract
A threshold is the strip of stones that forms the bottom of a doorway. It is the space that demarcates a transition between inside and outside. Poised on this threshold you are situated in the liminal space of potential, of becoming.
A threshold is the string to a kite. It is the tension between the imagined or perceived freedom when it flies in the sky, and the actual constraints placed by its holder.
Artists in Threshold explore the transitory spaces between physical and imagined, body and society, psyche and landscape.
Enhe Zhu
Enhe Zhu's practise explores the threshold between the worlds of the dead and the living by presenting Chinese traditional ceremony scenes. This installation references “祭祖”, which is a ceremony to welcome ancestors through food offerings and burning ingots, candles and incense. Green is a symbolic color in Chinese horror movies and suggests a liminal or surreal space between imagination, the present and the past. Zhu works with a variety of materials and methods, from casting to wax working. Wax is understood by Zhu as a plastic material that acts as a medium between the worlds of life and death.
Mia Grassie-Clarke
Mia is exploring the bounds of the canvas as well as the action of painting as a way to re-frame expressions of the female body. The use of unconventional stretching methods along with expressive painting and sculpture elements show the ways in which both the artist and the viewer can embody a painting in multiple dimensions. Looking outwards to a door frame and inwards to the bones you can see layers of critical thinking about the space and mark making. Through a varied use of material she is exploring the viscerality of the every day from a feminine gaze.
Freesia Tianyue Pi
At the centre of my work lies an examination on various materials and media to embody spatial and cultural experiences through rebuilding fragmented memories. By combining painting, ceramic and textile, I condense the sensory experiences into new narratives. My installations collapse and reform domestic objects and imagery into an exhibition space, where I dissolve the threshold between art and domestic ornament.
Jingxi Yang
No matter where I am, no matter how far away from home, I am always a kite blowing in the wind. Tethered to my distant home by its string, the kite is always leading my thoughts back home. Red boats act as my diary, keeping the days I am away from China. This timekeeping is assembled into a red river and encapsulates a longing lonely mood, as these boats face towards my hometown. Constructed out of rice paper, bamboo, string and oil paint, my kite is a homing pigeon which echoes the delicate emotion of reminiscing about my hometown and a desire to return to childhood.
Cecily Lasnet
Cecily Lasnet’s practice is developing as one of close reading, listening and looking where she records the spaces of her own lyrical subjectivity. Dealing with the pain of moving through time and further from something loved and lost, her practice incorporates drawing, writing and bookmaking as mediums for recording moments in time, and time passing between moments. Cecily is showing a publication displayed as a series of prints whose genesis is in writing. Each print, built of layers of colour and translucency maps out a passing room of emotion.
Pengyi Li
Pengyi Li is a curator and writer whose practice focuses on the cross-contextual presentation of historical artifacts, video archives and geopolitics, to address the complex issues of displacement and identity. In curating this exhibition within an exhibition, Flesh and Blood: The Texture of Culture, Li explores the perspectives of artists Michalis Karaiskos, Ellie Pearch, and Fi Isidore. Through this process, he pays particular attention to the close connection between individual identity and collective memory. He aims to reveal the multiple dimensions of the body as a bearer of cultural and personal meaning, as well as its complexity in the context of post-colonialism and globalization.
Xin Huang
In Chongqing, a city in southwest China, people repurpose and navigate the negative spaces produced by urban infrastructures. Lingering in the air above and beneath their feet is a mist imbued with the scents of mountains and rivers. My work is concerned with the aesthetics of urban human lives and the buildings that they inhabit, grounded in the intersection of infrastructure and nature. Through sculptural forms, I recombine building and industrially processed materials to present a sense of abandoned urban environments and the instability of the humans that inhabit them.
Ella Deregowska
Pushing beyond the spatial constraints of the sketchbook: the pencil translates the artist’s body, the gallery walls and floor, the page. Through intuitive use of crayons, tape and charcoal, the ‘gallery as sketchbook’ is mapped. Activated to resolve the feeling of overwhelm as a result of sensory overstimulation and the conflicting information that dictates contemporary life, the artist pushes movement and drawing as acts of self care. What remains is a performative recording, a three-dimensional drawing that documents a psychogeography of this cognitive dissonance.