Liminality Antipodes

Artist Statement

In the liminal spaces where the ethereal touches the terrestrial, my infrared exploration of the South Island of New Zealand captures a world both familiar and otherworldly. As alizarin crimson mountains rise and teal waters mirror the rich deposits of pounamu (greenstone), these surreal landscapes bridge the realms of reality and myth. 

Liminality Antipodes is an extension of my first Liminality series captured in the Isle of Skye in 2019.  The South Island of New Zealand is almost the antipode of the majestic Isle of Skye. I have always been fascinated by antipodal points, places that are a world apart but bound by an invisible thread. Perhaps through my meditations I’ve sometimes imagined digging down down down, journeying through the centre of the earth and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and emerging at the exact opposite side of the earth. 

I see many visual similarities between the landscapes of Skye and the South Island of New Zealand. There’s also the fantastical, fairy tale link, maybe thanks to Tolkien. As I journeyed thorough the South Island of New Zealand and read about the Maori creation myths and supernatural beings. Maori myths make mountains sacred by attributing them with divine origins, supernatural battles, and significant cultural narratives. In these landscapes, you can almost sense the presence of the elusive Patupaiarehe, also known as the “mist people.” These almost fae-like beings are said to dwell in the forests and mountains, adding an element of enchantment and mystique to New Zealand's tapestry. 

In this series I’ve aimed to convey the majestic power of mountains, with their towering peaks, rugged slopes and dramatic fall down to ancient lakes.  The scale and beauty of the mountains of New Zealand evoke a sense of awe and reverence. They are the snow capped giants of the landscape, holding a tapestry of forests, rivers, waterfalls and meadows. To me they are nature’s masterpieces, sculpted by tectonic activity, erosion, weathering, glacial activity and deep time. 

Essay by Dylin Hardcastle

To find a home in Liminality, in the threshold of a horizon, between deep sky and wide lake, where the near and far feel not so far apart, is to surrender, voluptuously, to something felt. It is an ability to sit between regions - opaque and edged - and to feel, instead, the incredible release of shapelessness. If a binary is two sides of the same coin, Liminality, perhaps, is the coin in motion. It’s the spinning, the gliding, the orbit… Circles of memory and dreams that slip into the before and stretch out into the after. Where the present is both a collision and a reckoning… Of all that was and everything that will become. Because, to me, it doesn’t matter where I’m going, only that I’m going. 

When I look at Kate Ballis’ Liminality Antipodes series, the works speak so deeply to my transness, to the home I’ve found in the slippages between what you see and what I am underneath. Because I exist otherwise - joyous in the calm of my own knowing, a reality that is felt more than it is thought. 

To find a home in Liminality, then, is to exist in the red darkness of shadows cast between folds of earth. In the cloud hunched over the crimson shoulder of a ridge and the veil of pink mountain fog that thins in the sunshine. 

Or, perhaps, in the slow of a glacier gently moving between the slumped arms of the mountain, static to the naked eye, but the mountain knows better... because the ice is, in truth, a river that flows at the quiet creep of millennia. 

People often fear the in between. There’s little, if anything, to hold onto, no maroon earth to take root in, and no language to describe your existence, because you’re free falling faster than the writer can invent. And yet, through surrendering to the rush of wind, you learn, some sensations are meant only to be felt.