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The In-between
For nearly five years, the act of carrying a camera transformed how my body moved through the ordinary world. It became an ongoing exercise in attuning, a way of training my senses to catch the fleeting, vibrating borders between and around things. I began to actively hunt for the physical sensation of the threshold. I felt it in the morning light forcing my eyes to scrunch shut, capturing my body half in, half out, suspended between sleep and waking. I smelled it in the dense, damp weight of heavy fog that swallowed the oval at the end of the street, an atmospheric shift that dissolved the horizon line and obscured any reliable sense of spatial order. It forced a constant, sensory renegotiation of the ground underfoot.
Through this daily, durational practice of looking and sensing, my comprehension of thresholds began to unravel and mutate. My attention drifted constantly towards the quiet, relational friction happening on a micro-scale. I would sit in the stillness of a room, watching condensation gather on the bathroom window, blurring the boundary between inside and out. The lingering moisture rendered the usually transparent glazing suddenly more material. I noted the imprint of clothing pressing into my own flesh after a long day, tracing the temporary elastic lines left behind. Perhaps sitting with something long enough to let it mark the skin indicates an underlying comfort in the meeting.
By gathering these spontaneous captures, the sheer messiness of territorial negotiation revealed itself. A boundary functions as an active zone of compromise, a site of continuous trace and impact. I found myself asking how the rigid geometry of a painted line on a bike path contends with natural incursions that puncture and unwrite its structuring lines. What is the physical weight of a flower resting in the palm, its shadow articulating a change in physical territory as it presses into the skin? When working with clay, my skin adopts the powdery traces of the earth while the malleable surface accepts my own imprints—a literal interpenetration at work where two surfaces come into contact and begin to adopt each other's texture.
The process of compiling this archive into a photo series amplifies the complexities of the in-between. The thresholds I moved through each day remain highly active, shifting conditions that continually resist solid definition. Staring into a puddle days after rain, the line between the right-way-up world and its inverted twin becomes difficult to differentiate, presenting the boundary as a fluid zone. As I sit with these images, grouping them by mechanical actions like penetrating, blurring, or illuminating, I am left navigating the uncertainty of my own edges. How do we document a threshold without inherently solidifying it? Where does the impact of the environment end, and my physical self begin?
Soft improvisation
2023
Library
Yoko Akama, "Being awake to Ma"
Yoko Akama’s paper on "Being awake to Ma" completely flips how we understand empty space. In Western design, we often treat the space between objects as a void that needs filling, but Akama introduces the Japanese concept of Ma, which treats that in-betweenness as a dynamic, active participant. It is the pause between notes, or the heavy tension between two people. For my research, this was a massive perspective shift. Within the spaces of the psychedelic surround, I was asked to consider the empty space hovering between a patient and a researcher. How does this invisible volume hold anxiety, anticipation, or comfort? Akama’s work encourages me to treat the in-between as a tangible material that I can mould and shape. It demands that I ask how we can design 'nothingness' with the same rigour we apply to steel and timber.
Ally Bisshop, "For the Exhausted Ones"
Bisshop’s paper situates chronic fatigue within the intersection of crip theory and affective politics. She views exhaustion as a generative zone and a mode of resistance against late neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Bisshop reframes thresholds as dynamic sites where potential swelled. She translates this into spatial reality by observing how a depleted body navigates environments through slumping, dragging, and crawling. Dragging a rug outside to lie down shifts her sensory perception of the space, allowing her to tend differently to the world. During the compilation of my photo essay, this framework expanded my evaluation of transitional states. The body itself became an active site of affective thresholding. Internal emotional and physical states carried their own spatial charge.
Till Boettger, Threshold Spaces
This book is the brick and mortar of thresholds. Threshold Spaces is a deep dive into the literal, physical transitions within architecture. It looks closely at how spaces shift from one state to another—think foyers, doorways, and corridors—and the specific design tools used to make those transitions happen. I find this incredibly grounding. When I am out doing sensory autoethnography at a hospice or clinic, I need a way to anchor my wilder, abstract thoughts about 'in-betweenness' back into the structural reality of the built environment. Boettger provides that scaffolding. She invites me to look at the junction where a polished concrete floor meets a heavy rug and ask: what is this boundary actually doing to the body? It is brilliant for the photo essay because it challenges me to capture the hard edges of a threshold while still acknowledging the spatial blur.
Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture
Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture is basically an ode to the tiny, almost invisible things that happen just beneath the surface of our awareness. It looks at how movement and affect shape our reality before we even have the words to describe it. Manning wants us to notice the microscopic shifts - the minor gestures - that actually dictate how a space feels and operates. For my own work looking at therapeutic and clinical environments, this is absolute gold. It gives me a language to talk about the messy, unspoken vibrations of a room. While taking photos for the project which ultimately became "the in-between", this text reminded me that I am not just capturing an empty corridor; I am trying to photograph the latent energy of bodies moving, pausing, and feeling. It helped me to look for small evidences of thresholding capacities in the traces of the world around me.