THRESHOLD is a duo show where two artists, Jenna Coombs and Eloise Dethier-Eaton came together at 1B Window Gallery to find the common ground between their distinct practices.

Jenna understands grief as a liminal space; a time and place that holds her captive whilst the world continues to operate senselessly around her. To portray this psychological state, Jenna will piece together discarded bits of wood with newer ones to create a puppet, ‘Sandman’, accompanied by a soundpiece. In doing so, she hopes to reflect on the many histories and stories that wood holds. As it carries the energy from a living organism that once breathed life, wood has a past, present and a future. In this sense, this material allows Jenna to articulate her relationship with grief, which similarly requires oneself to piece together their old with some new in order to find new ways of functioning and understanding the world around them.

Eloise’s sculptural installation evokes those moments when material off-cuts are glimpsed on the margins, leaning to the side of a construction site or on the street pavement. At first appearance these seem to be panels of wood, stone and marble. In reality however, they are discarded boards that the artist has found then painted to mimic those materials, following the trompe-l’oeil tradition. By using these illusionistic painting techniques, Eloise hopes to engineer uncanny moments of surprise when viewers realise they have been tricked, thus undermining the preconceived notions of value and hierarchy that we assign to materials.