Introduction -
Christine Healy - Liminal Field

Christine Healy
Liminal Field

Samantha Harvey’s short book Orbital merges science with speculative fiction to meditate on the world’s fragility (2023). Orbital follows the lives of six astronauts orbiting the earth over 24 hours. The book traverses from the micro to the macro constantly. We zoom in on their human mundanities (such as excessive exercising to prevent atrophying muscles and floating in gravity-free sleep). We zoom out to witness the fragilities of the planet as a super typhoon moves across Asia. As they watch the typhoon from the distance of outer space, we are left to reflect on both the uncontrollable power of nature and the impact of climate change. Orbital is an elegy to the awe and fragility of nature— how we sit at the precipice of climate changes we can’t reverse.

Like Orbital, Christine Healy’s painting can be read like elegies to nature. Visual poems honouring the majestic fragilities of nature. How nature holds both grief and hope as bedfellows. How the awe-inspiring rhythms of oceans can attune to our emotions when we can’t find a voice. How the atmospheres of skies constantly shift from the profound to the mundane, the fragile to overwhelming.

As painted poems, Healy’s elegies bear witness to nature’s emotions— the awe, wonder, vulnerability, power, beauty, grief and hope. A constellation of attunements through colour, movement and texture. It is a space in which grief and hope are entangled. An elegy to where joy, awe, fragility and the transitory meet.

Each of Healy’s paintings are invitations into her process of elegy making. Psychological moments in the liminal field. Some evoke process and ritual. The bringing together of the profound and mundane. Knowing that some things in nature are unknowable. Longing. Gathering. A new language. The swim. Secrets too tender. Reckless green. Ghost nets. After light. When Healy speaks about the process it is a “fragile coherence” between the spontaneous and the edited. It’s a curiosity about process and play that is comfortable with the ambiguity of the liminal.

In Anthropology, the liminal field is the uncertain space in a ritual before the transformation. Like the Japanese notion of “ma”, it is an in-between space to be honoured. Whether it be the permacrisis of war, the deep grief of Anthropocene, or the Al prophecy machine, we live in a time of great uncertainty. Or, as Healy suggests, in a time of the liminal field. Rather than sitting with the negativity of uncertainty, the liminal suggests an in-between space to be reflected upon. A moment for mediation before transformation. Contemplation on intentional ambiguity.

Like Orbital, Healy’s Liminal Field constantly moves in and out of the micro and macro. Merging awe with vulnerability. Fragility with power. We as viewers are left with a series of beautiful visual elegies to nature— an entanglement of human and more-than-human. These elegies hold space for ambiguities and the unknowable in nature. They are about liminal moments in human connection with nature. How nature is so fragile and yet awe-inspiring. How the limits of our perception make it unknowable. How if we occupy the in-between space of uncertainty and ambiguity we can also bear witness to moments of profound connection.

Dist. Professor Larissa Hjorth
May 2026