This month, we invited artists, writers, and interdisciplinary practitioners to submit work that explores the liminality of time—those thresholds where past, present, and future blur, overlap, or dissolve.
Time is often imagined as linear, measurable, and fixed. Yet our lived experience tells a different story: moments stretch and contract; memory reshapes chronology; anticipation folds the future into the now.
There are spaces where time hesitates—twilight hours, transitional seasons, states of waiting, endings that feel like beginnings. These are liminal zones, where certainty loosens, and transformation becomes possible.
Artist: Josh Rendell
http://galacticwomble.teemill.com
Dali would be proud
Description: A somewhat literal interpretation of the instability of time, with a clock tower that has itself succumbed to the fragility of time. Reminding me of the Dali melting clocks, this local clock tower stopped working, and the hands of time started to eat themselves into each other, eventually causing time to stop on this face, while the other 3 faces still operate as usual.
Artist: Charles Eades
https://charleseades.co.uk/
Don’t Go in the Room
Description
This is a haunted house-themed video art piece that explores the liminal zone of an empty room, inhabited by restless and violent spirits. It challenges reality and perception while exploring the psychological impressions and uncertainties left by traumatic memories.
Artist: Arata Nakamura
NO FACE - 60 / 90
Description: In 1969, The Beatles stood on a rooftop and sang “Get back to where you once belonged,” as if lamenting the passing of their own era. That image would later become myth. In 1994, Oasis released “Whatever,” singing “I’m free to be whatever I choose,” and ignited the world with a vision of rock ’n’ roll that embraced change without fear. In traditional Japanese Noh theatre, the mask of Okina represents something sacred, with a meaning that does not waver, while the Ko-omote mask expresses something ambiguous, whose meaning shifts depending on the viewer. By placing two masks that never appear together within the same Noh performance side by side, this work overlays the relationship between what becomes mythologised in rock culture and what continues to be reinterpreted through time, while reflecting the temporal distance between the 1960s and the 1990s.
Art film time road
Artist: Koki Kisawa
https://www.asuka1992.com/en/
on the road
Description: Duration: 7 min 41 sec Genre: Fiction / Experimental Film Concept Time is a mysterious thing. Even within the same span of time, it may hold little meaning for one person, while for another it may be profoundly significant—perhaps even a matter of life itself. Each individual experiences time differently. The boundary between one body and another is also a boundary between different experiences of time. This work explores the relationship between time and the boundaries of the human body through the lens of reproductive medicine.
Artist: Iza Nez
https://www.izanez.art
Doing Things to Time
Description: Iza Nez is interested in how we experience time and how we can alter our own perception of time passing. We do not normally think of time as something that we can affect, yet so many verbs we use when we speak about time actually describe physical actions that imply agency. In the video work Doing Things to Time (2023), Iza performs some of these actions (e.g. putting in, taking out, cutting, carving, squeezing, sticking) on dandelion ‘clocks’. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in between how we think and speak of it.
Artist: Jie Huang
www.jsusya.com
Silent Interest
Description: Silent Interest is an ongoing conceptual project that translates emotional experiences into the structure of a financial ledger. Inspired by the logic of compound interest, the work examines how subtle, often overlooked emotional moments accumulate over time, shaping an individual’s internal state without immediate visibility. Rather than focusing on dramatic events, Silent Interest records everyday emotional transactions — moments of restraint, encouragement, neglect, self-discipline, or quiet endurance. These experiences rarely produce instant consequences, yet they continue to accrue, much like interest in a silent account, gradually influencing behaviour, perception, and self-worth. The project adopts the visual and linguistic language of accounting — balance, income, expenditure, accumulation — to question how contemporary systems quantify value, productivity, and emotional stability. By reframing emotions as an invisible economy, the work exposes the tension between measurable systems and internal, non-quantifiable human states. Silent Interest does not seek emotional resolution or optimisation. Instead, it functions as a reflective mechanism, inviting viewers to confront the long-term impact of emotional governance, self-regulation, and societal expectations embedded within everyday life.
Artist: Jingyi Li
The Inhabited Mirror
Description: The Inhabited Mirror is inspired by a folk belief from coastal Fujian, China, in which mirrors are believed to shelter the spirit. Through fragmented and digitally reconstructed imagery, the work explores the mirror as a liminal space where memory, presence, and identity become unstable and cyclical rather than fixed. Blurring the boundaries between past and present, familiarity and estrangement, the work reflects on how identity is continuously reproduced through repeated acts of viewing. The damaged and suspended image evokes the feeling of encountering an uncertain memory or a presence that exists outside linear time, hovering between disappearance and return.
Artist: Anthonia Ndukauba
A knit in rows builds Ten
Description: A Knit in Rows Builds Ten responds to the theme of The Liminality of Time by presenting time not as a fixed sequence of moments, but as a slow, embodied act of becoming. At the centre of the painting, a seated figure knits a vivid red textile while a single strand of yarn extends downward to a tightly wound ball. The work situates the viewer in a threshold space where past, present, and future coexist within the repetitive gesture of making. Knitting is inherently temporal. Each stitch records a moment that has already passed, while simultaneously constructing what is yet to come. The emerging fabric becomes a visible archive of accumulated actions, a material trace of duration. In this sense, the painting transforms the act of knitting into a metaphor for lived time itself: each row is both an ending and a beginning, a completed unit that enables the next. The title, A Knit in Rows Builds Ten, emphasises counting, repetition, and progression, suggesting time as a process measured through acts of attention rather than through clocks or calendars. The figure occupies an ambiguous state of transition. Rendered in expressive grayscale against a saturated orange ground, the body appears suspended between solidity and dissolution, presence and memory. The unfinished textile resting against the torso reinforces this sense of incompletion. The work captures a moment that is neither arrival nor departure, but a pause within an ongoing transformation. The red yarn functions as a connective thread between temporal states. It links the potential contained in the ball of yarn, the labor occurring in the present, and the fabric that has already come into being. Through this continuous line, the painting visualizes time as cyclical and interwoven rather than linear. By focusing on ritual, repetition, and the gradual accumulation of gestures, A Knit in Rows Builds Ten explores a liminal zone where making becomes a meditation on duration, memory, anticipation, and the fragile continuity of human experience.
Artist: Cameron Lings
www.cameronlingsart.co.uk
'_______, Anyplace, Anywhere'
Description: An installation consisting of a series of analogue clocks, each displaying a different time through static hands. This data-driven art piece encodes the hidden word 'Anytime,' within the display of each clock.
Artist: Rob Judges
rob judges.com
Timescape2
Description: A landscape through time and seasons. The idea to combine photographs of different seasons was provoked by David Hockney's supposition that photography was two-dimensional in notes at a Tate Gallery show. The multi-layered approach gives the viewer the ability to imagine a place through time and gain a deeper insight to 'Place".This goes to the very core of this exhibitions theme.
Artist: Seitaro Yamazaki
https://seiyamazaki.com/
Piano to Nature 2
Description: This work involves placing a Steinway upright piano, used by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto for recording his final album, in Hirono Town, a disaster-stricken area of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and observing it until it disintegrates and returns to nature. Some of the radioactive materials released by the Fukushima Daiichi accident will take over a million years to completely disappear. It is difficult for us modern people to imagine such a long period of time. In this work, with the Bergsonian concept of "here and now," the intention is to place a piano that will take several decades to return to nature, and further, to encourage viewers to imagine the incredibly long timeframe of the invisible radioactive materials within that earth.
Artist: Amy Hamilton
amyhamiltonartist@gmail.com
'Temporary Closure III' 2026, Oil on Wood, 7x10inches
Description: When creating my oil paintings, I focus on showing the subtle signs of decay: chipped paint, rust, dirt and discolouration. With this detail, I aim to invite feelings of sadness for their current, unmaintained state, while also giving viewers the chance to reflect on past happy memories. I make a conscious choice to make my paintings void of visible human presence - this absence allows the subject to exist without being tied to a specific time frame, allowing the passing of time to become blurred. The fairground, now abandoned, exists in a liminal state, stuck between the ghost of their past utility, and becoming obsolete. My paintings capture a freeze-frame within the decades-long timeline of decay, capturing a moment where the object’s purpose is shifting.
Artist: Andrew Bylo
https://andrewbylo.co.uk/
Mum 07
Description: There and Not There (a series of 5 portraits). I'm working from a small drawing done some years ago of my mum (now in care with dementia, and disoriented in time and place). Though I’ve drawn her all my life, when I visit her I now need to engage with her rather than draw her. I don't usually work away from my subject, so it's fascinating working towards a 'likeness' that comes more from the memory of when I did the drawing. What is interesting is the search for more than appears to be in the reference, and how to find it. Or even what it is. I started with the idea of the fading away and loss. Continual change happens in these images I make from it. Are they likenesses? On what level do we ‘recognise’? Then what sort of likeness? It's still mum, but more and more from my head. Maybe not so much of her, but 'of' her, an essence maybe; trying to capture something ungraspable, something that is not just an image of her physical appearance, something beyond that. Why base them on that particular drawing? For me, it always held a distant ‘otherness’ about it that stayed in my mind. My mum died while I was working on this series. Now that she’s gone, it's even more interesting. Mum asked once: “Am I disintegrating? How can you remember what you’ve forgotten?”
Artist: Dockeford
Evening echoes: Dancing
Description: Traces from the mind's eye, the ephemeral, fragile place where echoes of enduring friendships reside, communed through fine-tuning, conversation, movement. Through the affordances of abstraction, echoes take form to be held close as memories of 'being with' in a special temporal space. This is one from a series of images, 'Traces of the Mind's Eye' designed to capture and make real those echoes.
Artist: Sarah Pardi
Horse Play
Description: This painting explores childhood memories and the summer break. Summer break is one of the most liminal periods for children and teens - in-between the school year, responsibility, and the next milestone towards adulthood. Horse Play is about short, exciting moments with your siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Roughhousing, hide-and-seek, chasing, and catching.