Liminality: Disgust and Desire

In a world that is consumed with categorising its contents within the confines of boundaries:

Life happens in between the categories

Desire both confers and strips power

Desire and disgust are only a breath apart

To be human is to be hybrid and changing

We are precariously balanced between civilisation and savagery

The fine line between one emotion and the next

The fine line between fantasy and reality

The myth of the mermaid has been around for most of human history, celebrated and feared across the globe in a see-saw of representation: beautiful and desirable yet also an omen of disaster luring sailors to their deaths, a hybrid creature representing both hope and danger; wonder and horror; a co-existence of contradiction determined by feminine flesh. She is liminal: a woman/fish, poised between power and vulnerability. The depths of her underworld allow her existence to be shrouded in mystery. She dives into the ‘subliminal’, a space below the threshold of consciousness.

The symbolism of the mermaid has been co-opted for religious and social control. Early Christianity jettisoned much of the Pagan faith, yet harnessed its belief in mermaids to exemplify the dangerous threat of feminine sexuality to sanctity and self-control. Christian depictions of the mermaid shocked the masses into morality by degrading the feminine form. In early Christianity, women represented man’s fall from grace, and the prestige that religious leaders held meant that this view was adopted by many. This led to a deep seated acceptance that women were to be feared for their unpredictability and unruly desirability, and subsequently oppressed.

Later on in history’s timeline, we see Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ born and later still the Disney adaptation. Both provide a critical symbol of sex, patriarchal power and the female condition. The original tale follows a violent story of a young mermaid having her tongue cut off and dissolving into sea foam before her sisters try to sell their bodies in exchange to get her back. Disney’s adaptation depicts her as an embodiment of feminine innocence, willing to sacrifice all that she is for the acceptance of a man.

This project follows a series of visual narratives embodied by water. It explores femininity, masculinity and what lies in between. It follows conversations between love and anger, passion and trepidation, temptation and control. It skims between the upper world of reality and a dark underbelly of fantasy. It celebrates the fine line between one state and another in reference to how the feminine is perceived.