The Portals Project: El Umbral -The Threshold

An exhibition of mixed media installations and artworks curated by the four artists: Lucia King, Helena Goldwater, Simon Vincenzi and Wayne Lucas, with Lucia King as Project Lead. The Portals Project employed the theme of "thresholds to alternate realities" in the displayed works (see concept note below)

Since the artists exhibiting are all LGBTQ+ artists, the show also incorporated:
a) an 'Artists' talk' by each of the four artists detailing themes/methods in their practice open to the public, and
b) a 'webinar' on LGBTQ+ curation and collaboration. Contributors to the latter were Jamie Wyld (Director of London-based international moving image foundation, "videoclub"), Rachael House (Gallery director of Space Station Sixty-Five), and Gill Addison (artist/art critic). The purpose of the webinar was for cultural industry specialists to create a dialogue platform discussing how they could best support LGBTQ+ artists, in particular of older generations like ourselves, and to overcome pre-conceptions on 'what queer art looks like' by discussing the realities from both artists and curator/programmers' and investors perspectives, to improve future opportunities. The discussion held was fruitful in bringing together collaborators to this end and open to public feedback via the chat function in the webinar.

Photos: George Bularca, Courtesy of the artists.

Concept for the exhibition:
The exhibition comprised of works in performance, AI, painting, drawing, embroidered sculpture, and moving image installations. The works established thresholds for visitors to engage with; unbounded spaces, fantastic holes, precarious caves - sites of uncertainty, displacement and risk explored through an interdisciplinary arts lens.

The works collectively explored the ways in which thresholds, whether in fiction or in architecture, invite us to leave a space behind in order to enter another; to decide to cross into a different reality, one that may initially seem impenetrable but that opens up as one acclimatises. The invitation to pass through these portals offered intentionally unsettling choices aesthetically. The exhibition’s spatial interventions laid down a condition for those wishing to participate in the exhibition: the need to slow down and attend to the rationale of the artworks as a kind of game in which their interconnections become apparent through the viewer's active participation.

The outcome of the project was successful, particularly through attracting wider audiences of arts sector and LGBTQ+ organisations/stakeholders as well as local audiences to the gallery, via the artists' talks/presentations towards the end of the exhibition run.