This month I worked on a range of activities including a further review of my plan, a broad outline of my dissertation, some research and creative test pieces on the concept of liminal space, further research on western attitudes towards death and on death and memorial in Scotland, an early view of Aims, Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria which in the coming months I will map my progress against and finally some thoughts on the external facing project. I wrapped these items up in an overview and presented these to my peers for feedback.

As I reflect on what I have been working on this month, it is clear to me that the idea of liminality is key to my work in terms of death. The liminal space is the state of transition between one place or another or between one state and another. It can be thought of as a contradiction where the space is both inside and outside but at same time is neither inside or outside (Xenou, 2023). A liminal space might be physical or emotional or metaphorical. This isn’t a ‘comfortable’ space. It challenges the senses and logic. It tears at emotion and even at sanity as we struggle to deal with the transition and are pulled in different directions. In part of my peer feedback a student commented that my work was very personal and emotive asking if the reasoning behind my work should instead be, “impersonal, intellectual and learned?” This is an interesting point of view but I think that if I were to try to deal with death and stripped away all of the emotion and my personal experiences then my work would have to make less sense, have less impact, weight and meaning to me. Death and emotion and personal experience form a cornerstone of my work. It would be like me writing about war or famine or a remote culture from a dispassionate third party viewpoint when I had experience of none of these things.

I looked briefly at the idea of ‘thin places’ and want to look further into this to explore though of being caught between two worlds where the gap between these spaces becomes close at the point of grief.

I used the idea of liminality as the idea behind my creative test pieces, where I attempted to imagine in a visual sense this idea of discomfort and looking into the edge of the abyss. Liminality will form part of my dissertation and I have some ideas on my external facing project which will also use this concept. In that work I have been thinking of the black water of the River Styx between life and death and of trying to find a way to incorporate the spoken work as a way of expressing resonances and memory. This idea builds on a existing project about ancient rock tombs in Ireland and the sense that these rocks of Sligo have have no memory and yet at the same time when sounds touch these places do these sounds have ancient resonances. I do not yet know how to form this project and would need help, but in my mind I see a river constructed in the two dimensions of a photograph but building upon those dimensions and using sounds to either represent the wraiths who inhabit the banks of the river between life and death or perhaps to replace the water itself so that instead of the gentle soothing sound of water my work would use words.

All in all, an exciting time in my studies. I feel I have passed the hump of beginning a new unit and have dealt (so far) with gap between 3.1 and 3.2. The stress of waiting for assessment which is always a worrisome time for me is over. I feel that I have my feet under the table and a sense that I know which path I will take even if final destination is not yet clear to me.