Liminal Spaces

MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase, January 2025

I’m delighted to present the work of fifteen new graduates in this showcase, Liminal Spaces. MA Fine Art Online is a flexible two year postgraduate course at Falmouth School of Art, committed to innovative and sustainable contemporary art practice in the UK and internationally. The artists whose work you are invited to explore here have demonstrated their commitment to practice that engages with the contingent times we’re living through, producing ambitious public-facing exhibitions, live events, performances, publications and new collaborations. These projects are the culmination of two years of study across five modules and have taken place in a variety of contexts across the UK, Ireland, Nepal, the Caymen Islands and China. We can’t wait to see how these artists continue to develop their work and engage communities all over the world.

Josie Cockram, Course Lead

Throughout their MA journey, the students whose work is presented in this Online Showcase have demonstrated the capacity and resourcefulness to develop their practice, establish networks and disseminate their work in an increasingly complex and fractured global society. Many of their projects have addressed issues around sustainability, ecology, community and the practice of making itself. Projects have taken place across the globe from Grand Cayman to The Fens, China to Cornwall, and in spaces online. 

Liminality has its etymological roots in the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, and ethnographical roots in rites of passage, described by ethnographer Victor Turner as ‘rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age’ which we might broadly understand as a state of ‘betwixt and between’ (1991)¹. Although the notion of liminal places is an urgent and contentious one – border zones, no-go areas, de facto states and conditions of statelessness – the title of this year’s Online Showcase Liminal Spaces, references perhaps a more psycho-emotional space; a sense of restlessness, and an exploration of the productive tensions of living and working betwixt and between local, global and online contexts.

As these graduates approach the threshold of life beyond academia, many are already applying the skills and experience gained on the course to develop new methodologies, professional opportunities, communities and networks that will support and resource a sustainable career in the creative arts. I am hopeful that this group will embrace what Turner describes as ‘Communitas’ – to designate the feeling of heightened solidarity and social bonds produced during liminal moments (1991) – in life after graduation. It has been my pleasure to lead the Final Major Project module for these students, and along with supervisors Josie and Charlie, watch as students’ confidence, expertise and capacity to navigate their passage into and through the art world has grown over the course of the two Study Blocks. We are proud to present a compelling body of student work on this showcase.

Kate Fahey, Final Major Project Module Lead

Special thanks to the following for all their work and support for this group of graduates:

Academic team: Josie Cockram, Kate Fahey, Mohini Chandra, Jo Griffin, Evan Ifekoya, Srin Surti, Lucy Sames, Mary Anne Francis, Flora Bowden,
Luke Dowd, Charlie Duck, Tom Baugh and Rachelle Knowles

Student Support & Digital Learning: Rachael Burhouse, Rachel Tor, Beth Sennett, Pip Keyworth, Sam Cole and Roo Pescod

Organisational partners and supporters: Nancy Potter House, Topsham; Daylight Collective, Exeter Phoenix; Foundling Museum, London; Women’s Institute, Polruan, Cornwall; Copeland Park, Peckham, London; General Office Gallery, Stourbridge; Cord Surfboards, St Agnes, Cornwall; Kathmandu Art House, Kathmandu, Nepal; The Caribbean Club Hotel, Grand Cayman; Bishop Bonner’s Cottage Museum, Norfolk; Boston International School, Wuxi, China; Tunes in the Park, Port Eliot, Cornwall

The friends, family and support networks of all graduating artists!

¹ Turner, V. (1991) The Ritual Process : Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Cornell University Press