Artist Statement

The Liminal Spaces Series is about thresholds, those moments where something feels present and absent at the same time. I think of the in-between as something you can actually build. Boundaries, gaps, and partial structures can hold a lot, even when nothing is fully explained. I want the work to stay a little unresolved, the way an unfinished plan or a half-remembered place sticks with you.

Process is what drives this series. With glass, every step is a commitment. Containment, heat work, and timing decisions lock the form in stages, and if something goes wrong, you are not really correcting it; you are rebuilding it. That matters to me because the object ends up carrying a visible trail of choices. Ceramic has its own version of that. You can revise, but there is always a consequence through compression, assembly, drying, and firing. Both materials have real thresholds where small changes shift the outcome.

I do not try to make these pieces feel perfectly resolved. I want them to show how they were held, constrained, and brought to a finish. What you are looking at is not only the object but also the limits that shaped it. The work asks you to slow down and look again, because certainty is not the point. The pause is.

-Mike da Ponte