Institution
ATU Sligo
Medium
Installation
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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This project is for those who, like me, are drawn to how space can hold emotion—designers, artists, and individuals navigating grief or transition, as well as curators and researchers engaged in sensory, phenomenological, or reflective spatial practices. It began with my fascination with derelict buildings and ruins. My earlier work explored how abandoned spaces physically manifest psychological states. These structures, suspended between use and disuse, seemed to embody something deeply emotional—neither fully alive nor entirely gone. Their liminality, their capacity to hold memory and absence at once, became the conceptual foundation for a deeper inquiry into grief and transition. 'The Space Between' explores grief as both a spatial and emotional condition—a liminal state between what was and what must come next. The work emerged in response to the sudden loss of my father. I didn’t seek to explain grief but rather to inhabit it, to give form to its ambiguity and the formlessness that so often defines it. Instead of illustrating mourning, I asked; "what does it mean to move through a space that does not yet know what it will become?" Visitors begin in the familiar—immersed in projections of everyday life and the indistinct hum of daily sounds. Then, without warning, the lights cut out and the world shifts. Sodium lamps ignite, casting a surreal, almost violent pink glow before fading into a stark monochrome that strips the space of colour—and with it, the comfort of recognition. This disorientation is deliberate. Grief doesn’t follow logic; it is slow, fragmented, and cyclical. Translucent fabric panels hang in a haze-filled room, tracing intangible thresholds between states of mind. They interrupt the clarity of movement, inviting navigation through the space as one might move through grief—hesitantly, reflexively, without direction. As the soundscape shifts, time stretches and contracts, echoing the rhythm of my own heartbeat embedded within the audio. There is no resolution in the installation. It does not offer closure or healing. Instead, it invites stillness within uncertainty—a space where presence and absence coexist. Drawing on the theories of Van Gennep and Thomassen, and inspired by the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola, 'The Space Between' makes mourning tactile, atmospheric, and embodied. It is a study in how space can carry emotion, and how design can allow us to experience loss not as an ending, but as a liminal state with its own geography—unsteady, quiet, and profoundly human. In a time shaped by global instability, conflict, and collective grief, this installation offers a space to reflect on what it means to endure the unknown. As war and displacement fracture identities and displace communities, 'The Space Between' acts as a quiet counterpoint—a contemplative environment where shared vulnerability and suspended states are acknowledged. It reminds me—and I hope, others—that design, at its most sensitive, can hold what words cannot.
