How a Single Idea Becomes a Body of Work: Reflections on the Threshold Series
Updated: 1 hour ago
The abstract visual language of the Threshold Series evolved through responding to two landscapes I have lived in, the Yorkshire Dales and the Sunshine Coast, and acknowledging the undeniable and pervasive feeling that I belong to both places without fully belonging to either one.
This feeling didn't arrive as a finished painting in my mind.
It arrived as a question.
What does it mean to carry this feeling of being of two places?
I sat with this question for a long time before I understood how I might begin to approach it visually, in print and paint.
| Build an Abstract Visual Language
I've always been drawn to symbolic imagery - I attach meaning to visual elements and create connections to them through the stories that emerge from my subconscious as I'm making the work.
The catalyst for beginning the first painting in the series (Two Lands) came when I started identifying 'objects' that could hold a sense or a feeling of each of these two landscapes. A field barn from the Yorkshire Dales. A banksia from my garden. Mangroves from the edge of Lake Weyba and the Australian eucalypts in the local bushland. Each element carries a piece of my story: past landscapes of my childhood and my present bushland environment on the Sunshine Coast.
When I bring these symbols together they create a visual conversation about transition, transference and journeying between the landscapes.
| Break Down the Concept
A concept on its own can be hard to paint if you don't have a fully resolved visual language in place before you begin. But a concept translated into a series of repeatable motifs becomes something you can return to again and again, each time finding a slightly different interpretation.
My library of plant, building and raindrop motifs became the language of what eventually grew into the Threshold Series.
| Begin with the Elements
As the series progressed, the idea of bringing these elements together hadn't repeated itself so much as deepened.
Each new painting became a chance to ask the original question again, and see where and how the visual language was changing and evolving; whether that change was happening within the composition, the colour palette, the motif designs or the process.
Altering the materials and mediums became part of the enquiry, to see if new and different perspectives could be attained by changing the way in which these elements were expressed.
I found a new love of oil pastels on paper - they're a quick and easy way to capture simple shapes and forms whilst eliminating details. And printmaking inherently creates an abstracted expression of the leaves I'd chosen to explore.
| Let the Work Evolve
Two Lands incorporated the barns and the eucalypts in the same painting for the first time. This initial painting of the series didn't include the raindrops, as it was experimental and the first of its kind. At this stage, the visual language of the series was still in its earliest form.
One of the last works, Receiving the Dream, pushed pattern further into the landscape, exploring structure and geometry alongside organic interpretations of mangrove shoots as they grew into a band of tall trees through the middle of the composition.
| Beyond the Threshold Series
Already I'm thinking about a greater abstraction of elements of the visual language that evolved whilst making the paintings of the Threshold Series. My investigation of these ideas is ongoing and has extended into some 3D experiments in clay alongside works on paper. Whether or not any of these new investigations become fully formed ideas is immaterial; they are the next chapter in the journey of this story of two places, hybrid imagery and symbolic visual language.
You can see the full collection in my earlier post, Standing at the Edge of Becoming →
