Threshold of Self
FINALIST - Dean Cogle Portrait Prize 2025 and Lethbridge Smalls Art Prize 2025
The Threshold of Self explores the complexity of identity in a world that often feels fragmented and in flux. Each painting presents a self-portrait of only half my face, symbolizing a sense of partiality, incompleteness, and division—reflecting the liminal spaces I find myself inhabiting. These spaces, both physical and emotional, are thresholds between one state and another—moments of transition, ambiguity, and uncertainty. The half-face becomes a visual metaphor for the space between presence and absence, engagement and detachment, reality and illusion.
As life becomes increasingly complex, there are times when I feel disconnected from my own experience, as if operating on autopilot or drifting through the motions. The shift from light sketch to greater detail in each painting mirrors this tension between disconnection and the slow process of re-engagement with the world around me. The early, more fluid sketches represent a state of ambiguity, while the later, more refined portions of the work suggest moments of clarity and reconnection, though never fully resolving the underlying sense of incompleteness.
Contained within a 20x20cm square and life-sized, each work invites the viewer to engage intimately with this journey of self-exploration. The small scale, coupled with the focus on a single half of the face, draws attention to the internal nature of the experience, while the concept of liminality suggests that identity is never fixed, but always in transition—caught between different stages of understanding, between who we were, who we are, and who we may become.
The Threshold of Self seeks to capture this delicate balance between engagement and withdrawal, offering a meditation on the experience of living in a liminal space—where one is neither fully here nor fully there, and where the process of self-discovery remains unfinished, ever-evolving. It is an attempt to give form to the quiet, complex space between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the present and the absent.
The Threshold of Self explores the complexity of identity in a world that often feels fragmented and in flux. Each painting presents a self-portrait of only half my face, symbolizing a sense of partiality, incompleteness, and division—reflecting the liminal spaces I find myself inhabiting. These spaces, both physical and emotional, are thresholds between one state and another—moments of transition, ambiguity, and uncertainty. The half-face becomes a visual metaphor for the space between presence and absence, engagement and detachment, reality and illusion.
As life becomes increasingly complex, there are times when I feel disconnected from my own experience, as if operating on autopilot or drifting through the motions. The shift from light sketch to greater detail in each painting mirrors this tension between disconnection and the slow process of re-engagement with the world around me. The early, more fluid sketches represent a state of ambiguity, while the later, more refined portions of the work suggest moments of clarity and reconnection, though never fully resolving the underlying sense of incompleteness.
Contained within a 20x20cm square and life-sized, each work invites the viewer to engage intimately with this journey of self-exploration. The small scale, coupled with the focus on a single half of the face, draws attention to the internal nature of the experience, while the concept of liminality suggests that identity is never fixed, but always in transition—caught between different stages of understanding, between who we were, who we are, and who we may become.
The Threshold of Self seeks to capture this delicate balance between engagement and withdrawal, offering a meditation on the experience of living in a liminal space—where one is neither fully here nor fully there, and where the process of self-discovery remains unfinished, ever-evolving. It is an attempt to give form to the quiet, complex space between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the present and the absent.
