ALMAG presents the first opening of our 2009 exhibition schedule: "Liminal Liturgies" by Florenceville-based visual and ceramic artist Yolande Clark. The reception will be held on Thursday, January 8th at 7:00 in the evening. There will be light refreshments and the artist will be in attendance.

Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man's relationship to society, nature, and culture.

--Victor Turner


Birth is a universal rite of passage, for both mother and child: inherently ritualistic and revelatory, the birth process (including pregnancy) is a liminal state/non-state. The pregnant woman and her hidden child inhabit mysterious shady territory betwixt and between identities. This ambiguous status is transformed by the birth process itself; the crossing of the threshold. In giving birth at home, without intervention, I have consciously abandoned the medical/technological/industrial paradigm of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, in favor of the marginal, the independent, the liminal.


My painting practice, like my approach to childbirth, is abstract, spontaneous and improvisational, incorporating the gestural symbolic artifacts of ritual. I like to think of it as a form of liturgy: worship and prayer that explore the complexity of separation and emergence and my relationship with the divine, as well as the profane. Each painting is a meditation on the process of accepting and embracing "otherness" and transformation during the primal/trance/surrender phase of giving birth that is highly mediated, when submitting to the standard ritual of North American Hospital Birth.


In embracing the liminal phase, I am forced to create and confront my own liturgy and discourse, in life and art.