Standing At The Edge of Becoming: Abstract Expressionist Landscape Paintings of the Threshold Series.
- Jul 28
- 9 min read
The Threshold Series explores my connections to, and personal experience of landscape. These abstract paintings mark a noticeable evolution in my creative practice; a shift that has become more deeply grounded than ever in 'connections to place.'
| Experiences of Landscape
This connection stems from my lived experience in two different worlds. The first, held in my memory from the past and the second, my present day environment.
The Yorkshire landscapes of my childhood laid the foundations of my awareness and experience of landscape; glacial valleys, rounded moorland hills, upland plateaus and pastoral farmland characterised by dry stone walls and field barns. These were all vistas that became memorialised from an early age.
Decades later, the landscapes of Sunshine Coast have become similarly embedded in my memory. Living in the coastal fringe of the Australian continent, not far from the still waters of Lake Weyba, and more immediately my bushland block at Peregian Beach.
My studio sits beneath old-growth Northern Scribbly Gums, surrounded by a wild garden of Australian native plants, which have become the living backdrop to my art practice. It is from this place, quite literally, that this series has grown.
'Place', in this work, is not scenery.
It is lived experience. It is the emotional residue of environments absorbed slowly over a lifetime; the quiet accumulation of resonant fragments of hues, textures shapes and sensory inputs that lodge in the body long before they find their way onto a painted surface:
a field barn shrouded in low lying morning mist;
the glassy stillness of Lake Weyba at dawn and at dusk;
the way the silvery scribbly gum bark reflects light a different times of the day;
banksias dancing in the breeze;
lichens on a dry stone wall.
These are not subjects to be painted so much as presences to be recognised, responses to environment that are felt before they are seen, and reinterpreted differently each time they surface in the work.
Growing up in rural Yorkshire, the ancient glacial landscape became part of me before I had language for it; the hunched silhouettes of stone barns against grey winter skies, dry-stone walls weaving across the valley floor, a quality of northern light that is always slightly subdued, as if always holding something in reserve. These images did not stay in Yorkshire when I left. They travelled with me, settling quietly beneath the surface of everything that came after, resurfacing in unexpected ways long after I had made my home on the other side of the world.
Living now on the Sunshine Coast, I find myself in a landscape infused with extraordinary light and contrast.
The coastal wetlands, the paperbarks fringing the creeks, the banksias, eucalypts and native grasses; the energetic ocean and the beautiful reflective surface of Lake Weyba. This environment has become as deeply mine as anything I grew up knowing.
But it sits alongside my experience of the Yorkshire Dales rather than replacing it.
The two landscapes coexist, and it is precisely that coexistence, that threshold state between origins and present day life, between memory and the immediate living world outside my studio door that this body of work explores.
This series marked a 'threshold' in both my personal and my creative journey.
| Making the Paintings
These works began with a series of prints and sketches which came loosely under the umbrella of what I called The Mallee Project where I found myself exploring a eucalypt leaf and experimenting with ways to indulge my love of it's shape through creative experiments. You can read more about this project here.
These visual experiments led me to create several small works on paper, with the placement of the Mallee leaves becoming the focal point in all the designs.
These leaf shapes strongly evoked trees found in vistas of the Yorkshire Dales landscapes of my childhood. This led me to explore the shapes of the field barns, which dot the farming country, as an additional evocative shape that supported my growing nostalgic sentiments about these landscapes.
And so the narrative for this series came more clearly into being, and these works have come to be about the story of where I have come from, and where I find myself now.
| A Move Towards Abstract Expressionism
The abstract expressionist impulse in my work is not a move away from landscape but a move deeper into it, past the descriptive and into the felt. Colour, texture, pattern and gesture become the language of lived experience rather than literal documentation; a way of painting not what a place looks like, but what it is like to have been shaped by it.
Colour became a new threshold of its own to cross, with explorations of both muted and vibrant hues transforming and infusing these emotive hybrid landscapes with feelings of fading nostalgia. The paintings have become colour fields that express particular energies that I experience in nature.
Consideration of pattern and the calming effect I feel when working with it, became a very personal expression of myself within the work as I sought to unravel and explore the threads that hold the past and the present together and the journey of flux between the two.
| A Story of Two Worlds
The Threshold Series does not attempt to resolve the differences between where I have come from and where I am now, rather they serve to acknowledge and honour the journey from one to the other and the visual diversity found in each of the landscapes.
These paintings sit at the confluence of these differences, in a place of threshold that holds the energy of two very different worlds that have, and will forever, shape my existence; creating a unique energetic frequency where my past and present come together and allow me to describe a place where I feel I truly belong.
There are 10 paintings in this series so far.
| Another Earth
Another Earth rebuilds landscape from emotional memory rather than observation, with rolling hills and an open sky reassembled through layers of pattern, texture and colour. The banksias, drawn from en plein air studies in Noosa National Park, press forward with a bold, grounded presence, anchoring the work in a deeply known place with the vista extending into the Yorkshire Dales. Falling through the layers, the raindrops symbolise a state of flow, marking my passage between two worlds, two lives and two selves.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| Before I Belong
Before I Belong sits in a landscape that feels both inhabited and not yet fully claimed. Yorkshire hills roll through the background in quiet layers, dotted with the familiar motifs of rural life, while the dark sculptural branches of a Round Leafed Mallee eucalypt possess the foreground, bridging two worlds that are not yet reconciled. The raindrops fall sparsely through the composition, as if not yet in a state of flow, but showing the first stirrings of transition. This is a landscape of arrival, painted from the threshold, looking out from the new world at the receding landscape.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| Echoes of Home
Echoes of Home is the warmest painting in the series with a composition that evokes the feeling of two landscapes being finally at ease with one another. Field barns and gently sloping hills speak unmistakably of Yorkshire, yet the banksias and eucalypts settle here with equal confidence, no longer visitors in the picture plane but fully at home within it. The deep red sun sitting above it all, radiates a warmth that feels generous. The raindrops fall freely now, no longer hesitant, the flow between worlds has found its rhythm. Echoes of Home does not choose between places. It holds them both tenderly and imagines a new world, even as those echoes ripple across the landscape.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| In My Bones
In My Bones is a testament to the quiet, physical embodiment of landscape that unfolds over time; the way a place gradually becomes part of us through repeated, everyday acts of living. It reflects the subtle physical transformation that occurs through breathing the air of a place, eating food grown in its soil, drinking its water, and growing up through its shifting seasons. Over time, landscape moves beyond something observed and into the body itself, shaping memory, rhythm and perception in ways that are tangible and deeply felt. This painting considers belonging not as something verbally declared, but as something absorbed slowly, settling into gesture, instinct and understanding until the contours of a place begin to feel held, quite literally, in my bones.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| Under a Different Sky
This painting references the joy of finding myself somewhere I never imagined I would belong. The ground beneath my feet connects me, across hemispheres to the same earth I cam from and instils in me the same deep instinct for connection to the landscape, and yet the sky above tells an entirely different story. Where northern light levels are low and often heavy with grey, the light of the Sunshine Coast is expansive, high and radiant; it floods the landscape with a warmth and luminosity that changes everything it touches and invites a completely different way of seeing and being. Banksias from the landscape surrounding my Peregian Beach studio, root the work firmly in the present; in the place I have arrived at, grown into, and become fluent with. It is the anchor of the here and now. The raindrop motifs fall freely symbolising my immersion in the transition between one life and another, between the landscape carried in memory and the one unfolding daily beneath an entirely new and generous sky.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| The Land I Carry
The Land I Carry is about the profound and sustaining experience of belonging to two places at once. Not divided between them, but genuinely enriched by my experience of both. This painting speaks to that which accumulates within a person who has loved two landscapes deeply and brought reflections of one into the life lived in the other. To carry the land means to hold both places inside yourself and to know instinctively the feel of each and how to describe experiences of them in paint. Finding these sentiments surfacing in my work unbidden, is to understand that 'place' is not only where I stand today but everywhere I have ever stood and felt truly present and at one with the landscape. The Land I Carry is that knowledge, painted.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| The Quiet Road
This piece is a nostalgic reflection on childhood memories of the quiet country lanes of the Yorkshire Dales, where small stone cottages and farmhouses huddled behind dry-stone walls and field barns were scattered across the view. Looking back, I realise I was becoming fluent in place without any conscious awareness of doing so. By roaming through that landscape, noticing everything from sweeping vistas to the tiny lichens colonising stones and tree trunks, and experiencing the environment through all weathers and seasons, I was finding a deep and sustaining joy within it. All of this was part of the process of place settling subconsciously into the core of my being, becoming, in time, a defining characteristic of who I am.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
Original - SOLD
| Threshold
Threshold is the painting that names the series and holds its central idea most directly.
A banksia leaf field barn sits at the heart of the composition as if marking the point of passage between two worlds. The landscape is simultaneously the distant Yorkshire Dales and the nearby Noosa National Park. The warm soft pinks of the Sunshine Coast at dusk meet the cool grey of a northern English sky in winter, each world separately claiming its presence in the picture plane whilst being inseparably connected. The eucalypt branches reach upwards, symbolising growth from new roots and grounding the work firmly in the present place. The raindrops mark not an ending or a beginning but the living, breathing state of identifying so completely with two worlds. To stand at this threshold is to be fully alive literally, to both sides of the planet.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 50cm
| Traces
Traces is about memories that persist; the fragments of place and experience that have embed themselves so deeply in my psyche that they've become part of how I see the world, long after I've have moved on from formative landscapes. Deep crimson and rich green push against one another with an energetic intensity that resonates evokes feelings of warmth and familiarity. Field barns settle quietly into the layers of this imagined landscape, shaded by the leaves of the banksia. Raindrops fall through the composition, tracing a familiar path between two worlds. I haven't shed my history, I carry it forward with me every day.
Mixed Media on Canvas
50cm x 50cm
| Two Lands
Two Lands was the first painting in which I allowed both landscapes to occupy the same picture plane without asking either to step aside. It began as an experiment and became a revelation, the discovery that these two sides of myself, so geographically distant and climatically opposed, were not in conflict but in conversation, and had been all along.
The warm coral sky of a Queensland evening presses down from above while cool teal and blue-grey layers below carry the quieter, more measured palette of the Yorkshire Dales. The eucalypt branches arc across the composition with a bold, dark confidence, claiming their place in the present, while the rolling landscape behind them holds the softer, more distant memory of northern English hills. Neither world dominates. They settle into one another, finding a balance that feels not contrived but inevitable, as though this is how they always existed inside me, side by side, each one making the other more fully itself.
Two Lands is where this series began, and became its central question; what does it mean to belong equally to two places? This is the thread that ran through every painting that followed.
Mixed Media on Board
50cm x 40cm
Original - SOLD
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about these works or the Limited Edition Prints available. I’d love to hear from you and help with any enquiries.
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