Liminal Bodies, A Realm of Pure Possibilities

The concept of liminality has stuck with me since my days as a sociology student at university. My academic obsession with identity and culture kept this fascination alive as I struggled with my own identity and the degree to which I could somehow apply what I was learning to myself - like a kind of therapy or self analysis. Of course, i was never able to convince myself of any of it, because I felt that none of it really truly applied to me (how sanctimonious of me to think it would!). Maybe bits of one idea and another personally resonated with me, but never the full accounts of "otherness" that were in books about race and culture in modern society. As much as I wanted to fit into those books, I simply did not.

It wasn't until my second year when I came across the concept of liminal bodies, first from anthropology, and later from readings that linked many disciplines together. The idea of never quite fitting into anything structural felt more real to me, than the idea that I belonged exclusively to a class, a race, a gender, an archetype - or even a mixture of one or two of these modalities. And what struck me even more was that I realized nobody belonged entirely within this space either. That identity is fluid, and unique in ways that can only be discovered through the gaps or fissures between states of being, as oppose to some proximity to any of them that, let's face it, are man-made ideological constructs anyway -- and therefore, non-binding. I was 20 at the time; young, impressionable and ready to take on the world with the limited tools I had at my disposal. I was obnoxious. It was this revelation that, in the end, provided me with the kind of education (about myself and the world) that I was really after. It felt liberating.

This was also the connection and the foundation that I needed to have in order to push my painting further. Liminality is the state of the in-between; the state of being stateless (what an oxymoron). Was this not what I had been creating on canvas all along? It may just be a word, but one which helped me articulate my creative process at the time. It was a useful guide - just another tool.

I would choose to abandon the world of ideas in order to indiscriminately slosh and mix paint around until I saw some organic evolution in process: the layers affecting the texture; the colours changing the mood; and my brush strokes evoking movement and (mis)direction. Everywhere on my paintings reflected this state of statelessness; the process of "becoming" and never quite of "being". In fact, people have told me before that my paintings can feel unfinished, in transition, or still in process; that an idea (an archetype maybe?) is trapped in utero, waiting to find its place on the surface. That pretty much summed me up back then, and I have not stopped moving forward since.

“Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise”. -Victor Turner (1967: 97)