Throughout my MFA I looked to explore feelings of being on the verge of an intensely personal transition, the journey to becoming a mother. Unpicking the question of what it means to become a parent, an archetypal change that requires stepping into the unknown and entering into a different kind of relationship to the world.

As individual experience and potential for experience within this transition to parenthood is vast, the key idea that I found held the most draw for me was the concept of 'liminality'. Liminality is an inbetween state, as coined by Arnold Van Gennep in his early research into rites of passage, where the liminal represents the threshold between what was, and what is yet to come. Considering this idea within my research opened up a new question of how to reside within this liminal space and what it means to confront the unknown with its potential for both growth and destruction.

I began draw inspiration from doorways and entrances which symbolised this idea of leaving one space and entering into a new place. Of course, being that I tend to visit a lot of places with rocks, caves began to feature heavily.

"In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete."

 

'