Limbo: the place between worlds. Not heaven, not hell. Not quite gone, not quite arrived. A suspension.

​

The In Limbo Series (1998) is a body of approximately eleven paintings — ranging from 40×30 to 60×40 inches — exhibited at Market Station in Ottawa. The subjects are friends, acquaintances, and one child niece, each placed into a landscape that belongs to no geography on earth. The bare black trees that thread through every canvas are neither dead nor alive, caught in the same suspension as the figures below. The fields burn orange, glow green, shimmer blue. The sky sits at that particular perpetual dusk hour that is neither day nor night.

​

Figures crawl or recline in fields of multicoloured burned earth, or stand suspended in the electric blue mist — the same faces returning across multiple canvases, each time in a different corner of the in-between world. A year earlier, in the Martyrs series, figures aimed guns at their own reflections in closed rooms. Here, the walls are gone. The weapons are gone. What remains is open landscape and the quiet uncertainty of not knowing which way leads out.

​

The titles were drawn from Stranger on Earth, sung by Marianne Faithfull — a song about existing on the margins of belonging, about feeling perpetually in between. Each painting a different state. Each state the same quietly unanswerable condition.