A Walk on the Wild-Side: Scenes from a Liminal Landscape

Recently an elderly woman stood beside me looking through the window at my latest exhibition. She commented wistfully: "our house is so full of scenes of places we have been that there is no room for anything else."  She took a visible step backwards when I suggested she might throw some of the old stuff out in order to create space for the new.

Stepping back into the gallery I am set to reflect on this cameo. I am aware that as we get older - I am 70 next birthday - the tendency to look back can dominate our perspective. The power of experiences "back there" can preclude the daily opportunity we have to adventure the 'new' and the 'now', to view ourselves as in process of fresh growth. Alertness to the possibility of change can be dulled by the feeling that our race is almost, or already, run. The potential to 'come alive' in response to the new day outweighed by the heaviness of past existence.

If, as the existentialist premise would have it, 'becoming' is implicit in 'being' then the capacity to embrace the possibilities that current experience holds for us is the very definition of what it means to be alive. It follows that the inability to make this embrace is a sign that we may already be dying. 

Life/death is not an on/off switch but something we experience on a continuum, by degrees, incrementally, each and every day. Living and dying are both colour ranges implicit within our liminal landscape.   

As an artist my work, what I produce in response to the places gifted by the new day, is the evidence that I exist and, if it contains any beauty, then my life can be said to be beauteous. It is in that spirit that I walk the walk, however wild the terrain and however heavy the baggage I carry, alive to the embrace. 

Star Burst by Jim Nind