To convey feelings and emotions in art, an artist may use various colours, materials or positions of said materials to represent a certain theme or idea. For me, I used my interests in my art to make it look more unique and out of place, like the more uneasy side of things; such as the uncanny valley and liminal spaces.
The term 'Uncanny' in art is a concept that describes a strange and anxious feeling induced by familiar objects placed in unfamiliar or settling contexts, these contrasts stand out to the viewer making them think about it, sometimes even overthinking about it, thus making it more unsettling. The term 'Uncanny Valley' was coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970.
Artists drew upon the uncanny in art to create artworks that combined familiar elements in unexpected ways to provoke uncanny sensations. Today, the term ‘uncanny valley’ is also applied to artworks, animations, or video games that reproduce places and people so accurately that they generate a similar strange feeling.
Liminal space imagery often depicts this sense of "in-between", capturing transitional places unsettlingly devoid of people, common places that are empty or abandoned areas that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. The aesthetic may convey eeriness, surrealness, or sadness, and trigger responses of both comfort and unease.
Liminal spaces and beings can also anemoia, which is the feeling of nostalgia that one has never experienced. This can make one think back at the memories that didn't happen and make the viewer feel sad about past times, whereas they would be sad about those unreal experiences.
Or kenopsia, which is the eerie atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet, like a school hallway in the evening, or an unlit office on a weekend, an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
An interesting artist that I have been following over time is Ron Mueck, who is an artist who works with fibreglass, acrylic fibre and fabric to create sculptures that can look like people. Such as his sculpture 'Ghost', created in 1998. It is a very large sculpture of a teenage girl wearing a dark blue swimming costume. The long-legged figure seems to lean awkwardly against the gallery wall, her arms hanging down by her sides with her hands and their curled fingers touching the wall behind her. She has brown hair tied in a loose ponytail at the back of her head, and her gaze is directed downwards and to her right.
The sculpture is completed in a highly detailed and realistic manner, such as small dots visible on the teen's face and light hairs on her arms, these features make the viewer think of how realistic the figure is, yet not let us think of who it looks like as it is a mashup of different facial features to create someone anonymous.
I have used this technique to create my versions of fake, unknown people as I put together the facial features of John and Jane Doe's, another subject I am interested in, as they are the faces of unknown beings.
(an uncanny look on the figure's face)
(image of the whole sculpture)
The uneasy posture of the figure in Ghost and her downward gaze, which seems to avoid eye contact with the viewer, are suggestive of the bodily discomfort often associated with adolescence, especially given the exposure of her form in the swimming costume. Furthermore, the heightened scale of the girl may be seen to echo how a teenager feels anxious at being the subject of others’ attention, yet it may refer to the fact that the girl seems to want to disappear from the gaze of those around her.
'Spooning Couple' (above) is another sculpture by Mueck, representing a man and woman lying down together. Both figures have a light skin tone and are semi-naked. The figures are represented with a high degree of realism apart from their scale, which is approximately half-life-size. They are displayed on a low plinth so that the viewer sees them from above. The couple lies in a spooning position: both figures lie on their right-hand side facing in the same direction, with the woman lying in a slight foetal position while the man lies behind her, his body curled next to hers. The man wears an off-white T-shirt and is naked from the waist down. He lies with his right arm bent under his head and his left arm bent up to his chest. His pale brown straight hair hangs limp around his face and his gaze is cast slightly downward. The woman is naked from the waist up and wears grey knickers. Both of her arms are drawn up close to her body with her right hand pressed lightly against her mouth. Her straight brown hair falls under her head with one strand falling loose. The woman's eyes are also open and she looks slightly down cast.
Spooning Couple was made in 2005 according to the same method Mueck consistently employs to create his sculptures. Like 'Ghost', the artist begins with drawings before creating small maquettes made from plaster or clay to refine his ideas. The maquettes are gradually scaled up to create a full-sized, detailed clay model of the work. From this clay model, Mueck makes a series of mould sections to cast the sculpture in fibreglass. The fibreglass sculpture is then painted and the hair is applied, with each strand inserted individually into the polyester resin. The last detail added to the sculptures is the eyes. 'Spooning Couple', like all of Mueck's sculptures, is rendered with hyper-realistic detail, noticeable from the texture of the skin to the careful placement of individual hairs. Before working as an artist Mueck was a puppet and prop maker for television and film, where he developed his precise techniques.
The position adopted by this couple would usually convey affection. However, there appears to be tension between the two figures. Originally the artist had considered draping the man's left arm around the woman's waist. Instead, he retracted the arm, leaving the man holding it close to his own body.
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Anna Blom is an artist who has caught my eye and uses liminality in their work. A Swedish-born, London-based artist who has recently completed a Master's in Painting at the Royal College of Art. She holds a First Class Bachelor of Fine Art Painting from UAL Wimbledon College of Arts (2020). She has curated and participated in several group exhibitions and independent solo installations in the UK, such as 24 Cork Street and Copeland Gallery. Anna divides her practice between her London studio and Stockholm, where she works in an interdisciplinary manner combining painting, drawing, sound, words and found objects in arrangements of a continuous narrative in a diaristic archival methodology.
Her artwork is a narrative of her surroundings. It is an evaluation of the fragile details of the physical and psychological components of our everyday landscape, using a diaristic method she studies the isolated, overlooked and less-celebrated lapses of time. An act of watching and trying to understand co-existence.
The research is an archival process of collecting photographs, sketches, writing and white noise which is ultimately poured into a painting. The multiple layers on the canvas are built up with stains of thin washes using raw pigment and permitting situational debris to flow in. This creates textured, gritty, matt surfaces allowing the materials to explore each other, the colours indicating seasonality, and the debris enhancing an awareness of the place of production. The making itself becomes a memory of time and place, like a transition in an 'in-between', thus creating a liminal feeling.
An art piece from Blom that gives off this feeling is 'When Home Is Not a Home' and 'The Broken Blue Dress', both created with acrylic, raw pigments, and situational debris on canvas, in 2023.
Both of these paintings consist of the rough outline of a human, which gives it the liminal feeling as it looks like it is in the transition of disappearing, or becoming not what it was, as the titles suggest; the Home is not a Home anymore, and the Blue Dress is broken, thus not looking like how it should be. But this also gives it an uncanny look, as both of them have the human shape, the viewer does not know if they are a human or not, so we are put on edge as to what to think about it, the sudden scattered materials on the canvas and scattered dark spots of paint supports this, as well as the thought of sudden emotion.
It also shows that just because it has a familiar human shape, does not mean that we can trust it, even if it appears that it is leaving the canvas/image. For my pieces of art for the present and future, I can use this technique of using a human silhouette to give the viewer an idea of what they're looking at but giving the figure no distinct features so it still gives off an uneasy feeling.
Personally, I think that my art pieces reflect their inspiration mentioned here, because of the use of materials and types of shapes and textures made throughout, as well as colours used. In the portrait images, I have tried to convey the feeling of uncanniness as shown in the sculptures made by Mueck, by attempting to make them look too perfect, yet stick to my own ideas and inspiration with the idea of no identification.
(When Home Is Not a Home)
(The Broken Blue Dress)
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