Liminal Lives Showcase
VIRTUAL SHOWCASE
AUGUST - SETPEMBER 2020
Collectively, we are in a liminal space; between pre-covid and post-covid, as we move through and out of lockdown. Liminality comes from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold.’ Liminal Lives was a postal project aiming to bring individuals together to counteract social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic and socially distancing measures.
Liminal Lives was organised by Isabel McLeish as part of her graduate internship and was an opportunity to be part of a Scotland-wide socially engaged art project. Isabel had been painting during lockdown and using imagery of the remote islands of St Kilda as a visual metaphor for her experienced isolation during the pandemic.
Catriona Ross
'I've been recording the routes I've taken during my evening walks in lockdown.
Working within the confines of Covid-19 & a tourist map of my new hometown, I traced my walks, building up lines, documenting loops, crossed paths & dead ends.
I've reduced my map to postcard size, making the lines denser & less clear, experimenting with the way the quality of a picture degrades (or evolves) with prints of prints on the photocopier.
Using found materials to print onto adds another element of chance.
I'm interested in exploring the balance between the control of outcomes & of letting go.
The ephemeral nature of Mail Art appeals to me & the way the end result is determined by outside influences once it has set out on it's journey.'
- Catriona Ross, Lanark, South Lanarkshire
Suzie Eggins
'I’ve always enjoyed the quality of simplicity in art, but lately I’ve felt a real need for it.
With Covid in society at the moment, nothing in daily life is simple. Even a wee trip to the local shop brings up a complex range of emotions.
I’m finding solace in simple creative gestures, in drawing with basic shape form and colour. I love the feeling of the wooden pencil in my hand scraping across paper... it keeps me in the present moment, brings me joy and is quietly life-affirming.'
- Suzie Eggins, Edinburgh
Matthew Wickham
'Boo is doing all he is able to combat THE ENEMY…
Boo Simulacrum, performance persona, alter-ego, avatar (and so much more) of the artist Matthew Wickham has, since the advent of THE ENEMY, known as COVID-19, roamed the primordial forests with his fox familiar, voyaged the savage oceans and flown the Four Skies with the Hounds of Heaven. His mystic quest: to locate and vanquish this LURKER ON THE THRESHOLD in somatic form..
Boo is a Shaman, the re-incarnation of a Palaeolithic ‘Sman’: a man of power, a warrior. He perpetually inhabits the boundary state, the twilight, the interstices between this World and the abstract Realm of Thoughts and Dreams. He is a creature of the hypnogogia, or of the liminal, if you will.
Here we see that in the High Wastes of the World, Boo has finally run THE BEAST to ground. Having imbibed potent decoctions of certain herbs and fungi, and having also assayed the normal modus operandi of casting quartzite pebbles into the body of THE DEAMON, and the incantation of certain words of power, he has no recourse but to employ the use of his most powerful tool of all: the Vulpine Wand!'
- Matthew Wickham, Strathcarron, Wester Ross