![]() ![]() ![]() Occupying and responding to the architecture of the Sunken Gallery – a space that is itself liminal, set between the ground and lower floors of the building – Burns’ works ask us to consider our place within this odd territory.Ī reliquary of sorts for the objects, codes, customs and rituals that create the society in which we live, Limbo Land presents a vision of a place that constantly seeks to find its form, with little resolution. ![]() Culturally recognisable codes become suffused with the artist’s own personal symbology scrambling our reading of these small, almost devotional objects.Īrranged in manner that at times feels provisional, teetering, in a state of suspension or dissolution, these works are imbued with the sense of precarity and unease that inherently accompanies liminality that threshold state between one thing and another. Drawing on the visual languages of cartography, Christian iconography and national monuments, they bleed together multiple different sources and reference points. Hewn from a range of different materials, the sculptures on display are in themselves liminal objects. However, crossroads, borders, no man's lands and disputed territories also occupy this state of ‘in betweenness’ under investigation in Burns’ work. limbo noun U uk / lmb / us an uncertain situation that you cannot control and in which there is no progress or improvement: Until we've got official permission to go ahead with the plans we will remain in limbo. Limbo is also an unknown intermediate place or condition between two extremes. Other definition of limbo is an imaginary place for lost, forgotten, or unwanted persons or things. A supposed border-land of hell a region which has been believed by many to exist on the borders of hell, and to be the appointed abode of those. Limbo, in the theological sense, may be the ultimate liminal space: the threshold between heaven (salvation) and hell (damnation). The first definition of limbo in the dictionary is the supposed abode of infants dying without baptism and the just who died before Christ. Figuratively, limbo is a state of nonresolution or uncertainty: Until he receives notice of his new posting, hell be in limbo. A key concern within Burns’ practice, the liminal – from the Latin ‘limen’, meaning ‘threshold’ – can be understood as a boundary between one state and another a condition of prolonged uncertainty or that which does not fit or find form. Arranged across three islands within the Sunken Gallery, these objects are imbued with the history, culture and visual codes that have come to define Northern Irish identity, and speak to the peculiarities of a place once aptly described by Seamus Heaney as a ‘limbo land’.Ī visual consortium of fallen monuments, disfigured memorials and votive offerings, Burns’ works map a place that is both physically and psychologically caught in a state of liminality. With this exhibition, Burns presents a landscape of sculptural forms assembled from both personal and found artefacts. An exhibition of sculptural work exploring the complex relationship between memory, identity and place. ![]()
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