Umbrales | Thresholds - Marcia Espinosa + Sue Leeming

Umbrales - Marcia Espinosa explores the threshold as both an architectural form and a metaphor for moments of transition. Through charcoal drawings and clay sculptures, I draw on memories of Andean landscapes, ancient temples, sacred geometry, and the relationship between earth and sky.

Life’s challenges can bring us to unexpected thresholds, prompting internal questions about existence, impermanence, and the time we are given in this world. These moments of uncertainty and transformation become spaces for reflection.

Through geometry, repetition, openings, and layered forms, the works move between the physical and the inner world. Umbrales considers the threshold not simply as a passage from one place to another, but as a space between what has been, what is, and what is yet to come.

Thresholds - Sue Leeming

Sue Leeming’s latest collection of abstracted landscapes presents ‘Thresholds’ as not merely a boundary but a place of possibility. It is the space between what is known and what is becoming, between where one has come from and where one stands now. Her paintings dwell within this in-between space—the space between places, memories and states of being—-inviting contemplation of connection, belonging and the shifting ground of identity.

Born in Aotearoa New Zealand and living in Western Australia, Leeming’s praxis is shaped by her Māori and Pakeha heritage and by the experience of moving between cultural and geographical worlds. She positions the act of making as an autobiographical inquiry into the shifting contours of her inner terrain.

Through the juxtaposition of the painted image and free-verse poetry she invites the viewer to inhabit the pause between past and present realities, and what is actual and what is perceived. Leeming allows material, gesture and chance to enter into this dialogue with intention. Layers emerge, dissolve and reappear, creating spaces that hover between recognition and abstraction, presence and absence. The act of painting becomes a form of listening and questioning—an encounter with the unknown and what might surface when control gives way to intuition.

Her work ultimately suggests that identity is not a static destination, but a continual journey, firmly rooted in the brave acceptance of the transitions that define our lives.