Liminality: Reconfiguring identity and place through transitional rites in contemporary art practices

The research will build on my practice led DPhil - 'Liminality, Risk and Repetition: towards a feminine becoming in contemporary art practices'. The term liminal derives from the latin 'limen' meaning threshold and has been used in anthropoligical contexts since 1900s and in a broader cultural context since 1960s. The liminal realm is a passageway between two distinct states of 'consciousness' (eg awake and asleep), or 'being' (eg human and animal). Anthropologist Victor Turner has described the liminal realm as 'a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time'. In liminal space, our normal understanding of time which gives sense and order to experience is suspended and we may experience an altered understanding of ourselves and our environment. The uncertainty of these in-between states has led them to be regarded with suspicion and anxiety. In addition, liminal experience has been associated culturally in a negative way with femininity. My research aims to rethink liminal experience in amore positive light, drawing on the enormous potential that this 'space' offers in terms of developing our understandings of place and identity in the context of contemporary art practice. I will also be questioning and re-examining the relationship between femininity and liminality. Through my art practice, I aim to create physical and/or psychological spaces in which the possibility of an experience of liminality can occur for the viewer/participant. While I have already carried out a significant body of research in this field, I believe that huge potential exists for the development of this research. I wish to establish the optimum conditions to genrate liminal phenomena through an artwork, and explore the cultural effects that this could have. In order to do this I will be examining how we can access the liminal realm through artworks by altering our experience of time through ritual. Public art projects, site-specific installations and lens-based work will be the predominant mediums employed to achieve this. As part of my research, I will be seeking to develop and establish a network of artists and researchers working in the same field with the aim of organising a series of public art projects designed to explore the different strategies which can be employed through art practice to create liminal experience and the effects this can have for audiences and participants. These projects and an accompanying publication will aim to contribute to and promote further dialogue and research into liminality and its cultural implications.