The Visceral Alchemy of the In-Between

 

As I enter my studio to begin to work, what I am really doing is entering into another world. As I stand there on the threshold staring into the liminal space, the physical world stops being what it was, but the next part hasn’t yet declared itself.

 

I have come to understand that this is the place where my art is born.

 

The name I use to describe this in-between realm is the ‘Nightgarden’. It is a place I travel to; a genuine destination; a space between the waking world and a land of myth and fantasy. It is a space where the noise of the physical world falls away and something more instinctive becomes visible.

 

My paintings in the Nightgarden series begin at this gateway. At this point, with the burden of the material world still clear in my mind — wars, hunger, the cruel human atrocities that darken our planet — my works often begin dark and moody, the visual weight of whatever I am carrying emotionally. But I don’t carry this to the door alone. I bring with it the beauty of the natural world; botanical forms, tangled branches, quivering leaves. The painting starts as a tension between the two. As I work, the process of creating becomes the remedy. A desire to find the good in things possesses me at this point and I work to lighten, to transmute and to ameliorate. Glowing forms arrive, sparks appear, luminosity builds in the negative space. By the time a painting is finished, it has moved from one emotional state to another. The canvas has actively enacted transformation. What started as observation becomes something closer to myth or memory. An opening to a world where things are better, nature hums with life. A place where we are reminded that life is precious and must be valued above all else.

 

The Inner Lumen works push further into that territory. Here the botanical anchor no longer exists, but instead an internal architecture prevails: the emotional state that preludes language, a sensation before it becomes a thought. Where the Nightgarden paintings retain a thread back to the physical world, the Inner Lumen works sever it completely. They are the raw material of experience before it is translated; alchemy still in progress. These paintings represent a feeling itself and a pursuit to translate it on canvas. I often work along to music, allowing my mind to wander, my marks to become spontaneous; a quest for visual equilibrium and harmony. What remains constant in these works is an obsession with light. The light does not retain a fixed point, but instead arrives from within the darkness of the composition. It’s an emotional light, unplanned and illuminating without explanation. I cannot honestly say what these works are about, but rather what they are for. A celebration of freedom and positivity, a pilgrimage to seek light at the end of a tunnel. A reminder that we have good within us and life is better when we act upon it.

 

But it is in my sculpture that the in-between becomes most literal, most physical and most visceral. The Art of Unbinding created from a deconstructed wedding dress, beeswax, rust, ash, copper, crystal and found objects. These materials each carried their own symbolism before transformation. The trilogy maps a journey from suffocation to liberation, from sadness to joy. Loosely the series rewrites the myth of Andromeda so that she rescues herself. In this version Andromeda is not a damsel in distress, she is the master of her own transformation and the owner of her destiny. A red thread unites all three pieces, starting dark red, thick and heavy, softening and fading as freedom approaches. The process of creating these works was a literal act of emotional unbinding. Every aspect of the making, a symbolic gesture; crushing rust and ash — the Phoenix arising from what was broken. The shredding of a wedding gown — the ultimate act of sacrificing the token of marriage. The wax dipped objects — a layer that seals, protects and calcifies.

 

The Archival Remnants series extends this further still. The works start with objects that have been waiting, from jewellery fragments, shattered glass palettes, to upholstery fabric. Objects that were kept over a span of thirty years without knowing why. They resisted being discarded and I now understand that they waited patiently for a version of me with enough life experience, clarity and perspective to know what to do with them. Encased in wax, given context and structure — these things could never have become what they are now in my earlier years. The waiting was an essential part of their meaning.

 

Across all three bodies of work, the same movement is at play; a passage through darkness towards light, through entrapment towards freedom, through formlessness toward meaning. 

 

To understand my own art must first understand the true meaning of alchemy. Alchemy is the act of transformation taking ‘Prima Materia’, the formless, turbulent base matter and transforming it into something valuable, luminous and refined. That is beauteous to see, but the ultimate alchemical moment happens in the in-between state, the part when the substance is neither what it was nor what it will become. That threshold, represents the ultimate symbolic moment of magic.

 

My practice intentionally exists in this realm. Poised on the cusp of two places, where the natural world dissolves into dream, where metaphor replaces real experience, where what was broken becomes whole.

 

Jo Thorne, 2026