The Suspended State
How do we stay with uncertainty?
In my art practice over the last few years, I have been tinkering a lot with the idea of thresholds. I keep returning to architectural structures set in vast, dreamlike spaces – something like a portal, a sanctuary, a womb, or a mirage. I have quite a fascination with spiritual architecture, but also with more temporary or transient spaces – travelling carnivals, inflatable castles and marquees. These feel quite different to more fixed structures like a house, or I don’t know, a tower. There is something about them that relates more to passage than permanence, even if I don’t have the language for it yet (which is exactly why I draw in the first place.)
It’s something I keep revisiting. The liminal or whatever that ends up being called.
We’ve just had Easter here, although my background is Eastern Orthodox, so Easter for me is next week. Or both, really. I grew up with both in Australia. Double Easter. And despite not being religious, I do find myself drawn to the stories, the symbolism, the mythology of it all, even if I’m mostly engaging with it at the level of image and narrative.
I came across a post about the Marys who stayed during the crucifixion while everyone else left – or more specifically, while the men left. They became the guardians of the in-between… Remained with the body, present at the edge of something ending, without any clear sense yet of what would come next.
It’s a detail in the broader story, but it opens up a different kind of space. There is a tendency to move quickly through this part, from death to resurrection, but there is a stretch of time where nothing has yet become anything else. The body is still there, the outcome is unknown, and there is no narrative available to make sense of it.
It’s not a particularly comfortable place to remain. We don’t like uncertainty.
How do we stay in that space, though? In the uncertain, in the in-between.
In life, especially over the last few years, that space hasn’t exactly been optional. Since the pandemic, and everything that has followed, there have been long stretches where things haven’t quite made sense or settled into anything stable. A kind of suspended state that many of us have moved through, whether we wanted to or not.
I’ve felt that quite strongly. It overlapped with early motherhood, with starting again in a completely new country, through my art practice and my career. There has been a continual sense of recalibration for many people, of things shifting before they have even taken form.
When I think about my drawing, it seems to sit somewhere in that territory. The curves, openings and layered spaces I keep returning to feel connected to a condition of transition, where something is in the process of becoming without settling into a fixed state. The forms don’t always resolve, and I don’t really want them to (or when I do lean into wanting them to, I try to resist that desire for control).
That idea of the womb comes up for me here, not in a literal or illustrative sense, more as a kind of architecture. A space defined by containment, permeability and passage. A structure that holds something as it moves from one state into another, without determining what that outcome will be.
As a mother, this isn’t abstract. The body is the first threshold. Pregnancy and birth unfold slowly, often without certainty and being physically demanding, and there is no way of really stepping outside of it once it begins. It requires staying inside something that hasn’t yet taken form, which is not always comfortable, but is also the magic of it.
There is a kind of knowledge in that experience that doesn’t translate easily into language. It sits in the body, in duration, in process, and it resists being tidied up too quickly.
In the studio, this shows up through repetition and mark-making. Drawing and redrawing forms, letting shapes remain slightly unstable, working with layering, soft edges and openings that don’t fully reveal. The works build themselves in a way, holding tension rather than resolving it, which I realise might sound like a strategy, or wafty art speak, but is usually just how the process goes.
The eye appears fairly often, and light moves through the work. They sit there as elements of attention, holding a relationship between presence and perception. Seeing becomes part of the structure itself, which again sounds slightly abstract when written down, but feels pretty direct when I’m actually working.
Anyway. The Marys in that story stayed with the body. They didn’t move ahead of it, or try to resolve what was still unfolding.
I think about that sometimes in the studio, the not trying to rush ahead part. Letting time and energy do its thing.
This week, I’ll be dyeing eggs with my daughter, roasting lamb, keeping small rituals. Next weekend, Easter comes again.
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