Light is evasive, categorically inconstant: at once invisible and revealing, both wave and particle. Liminal – as in ‘barely perceptible’, as in ‘in-between’. From limus, oblique, and limen, threshold. (At the threshold of consciousness, subliminal; at the threshold of the divine, sublime.) Other than at its emanating source, light is perceived only where it touches a surface or moves through a medium, that is, at the threshold of matter . Absorbed, reflected, refracted, slowed – it reaches us obliquely as tone and hue.

Emerging from an unfolding conversation between three artists, Liminal Layers of Light brings together studies of light as particular to place. Beyond their formal affinities, Caroline Collom, Frances van Hasselt and Jenny Lundgren share a sustained attention to the ambient qualities of their respective settings – southeastern Australia, the Karoo in South Africa, and northern Sweden. Atmospheric and associative, the artists’ painted and woven compositions transcribe light’s transitory impressions in different registers of abstraction.

On canvas as on the loom, light assumes a sedimentary form: its luminosity described in layered pigment and fibres. In Collom’s paintings, incidents of light and shade excerpted from her surroundings are translated in chromatic geometry. Where she works with studied precision, Lundgren’s approach is one of intuition and improvisation – her paintings gestural, their light diffused. Van Hasselt’s tapestries, in turn, pair the structure of warp and weft with the serendipity of collaborative making. Suspended in space, her woven works appear veil- like, the details of their making made visible; placed against the wall, they assume a solidity of form.

In the months preceding the exhibition, the artists shared images and insights, comparing processes and preoccupations, and tracing resonances between them. The thick weave of Collom’s canvas found a parallel in van Hasselt’s textured compositions; van Hasselt’s embroidered stitches, an equivalence in Lundgren’s loose brushstrokes. Rectilinear shapes repeat in all three artists’ compositions, clearly defined or only faintly described. Opacities and transparencies similarly recur; layers that either obscure or disclose. Their works are equally possessed of a radiant luminosity – a “light within,” as Collom describes it. Their engagement, too, glows with gentle warmth.

Moving as light moves, the distance between these three artists is made insignificant, some twenty-five thousand kilometres in 0.08 seconds. Their messages, transmitted as electricalsignals, travel at similar speeds. But conversation keeps a different pace. A series of postcards is included in the exhibition as a physical metonym of their durational, online dialogue. Lundgren offered a beginning, followed by van Hasselt, then Collom, in a slow relay across seasons and continents. These small objects, having journeyed through time and space, at once illuminate the artists’ remove and draw them closer – to the threshold of touch.

Written by Lucienne Bestall