art classrooms are the opposite of liminal space
explain
it has something to do with the paint on the walls, the tables, the floor, the electrical outlets; the cans with their labels torn off sitting in the sink, full of paint-colored water; the pencil doodles on the tables that get erased and changed constantly; the way everything is arranged slightly differently every time you go in; the half-finished projects everywhere in sight, laying on drying racks, hanging on the wall, propped up on an easel. everything about it suggests continuous use even when it’s empty. it suggests continuity and returning and belonging
thats fucking beautiful what the hell
I think it also has something to do with taking the unknown and the mysterious, and transforming them into real things that can then be shared. Liminal spaces carry this sense of solid reality slipping away into the cracks, or something that isn’t quite real slipping in. Art classrooms are a space where, instead, nothing becomes something.
And it’s definitely connected to continuity; liminal spaces are often tied to Time, and its lack of passing or passing very fast without you realizing it. Art classrooms and art projects mark progression across time, which helps to define reality.
I’d also theorize that it’s an anti-liminal space because people and characters who experience liminal spaces are often being acted upon by other, greater powers. Art classrooms are a space where the student acts. They have power and free will. They have autonomy (excluding the class assignments of course).
Now I have to wonder what else counts as a non-liminal space or anti-liminal space. And would these same characteristics carry across to them?
Metal working shops are also non liminal spaces; everything in a metal working shop, and I would argue most crafting fixated spaces, are Real. Intensely, intensely real. Objects go from every single step of their creation, from their rawest form (ore, wool, string, plants), to every step of being turned into the object they then Are (a shovel, knit blanket, tapestries, dyed material).
Things Are in crafting shops. They Are and then they Become and then they just Are even more. There’s no wispy strangeness, no shifting. The park made on the wall where something banged it will probably stay there, theres paint on the ceiling from a mysterious past accident, the Things you made and make from are There.
I beleive in this very strongly because I grew up andering in my dads welding metalwork shops, and sometimes getting to see my grandmother (step, technically, but she was there MY whole life so) in her wool she dyed from hand written formulas and spun and knit.
There are few things, to me, as Real as the smell of ozone and melting metal, of copper dipped in chemicals to make it shine green and blue like the ocean, of the toughest woman I ever knew turning wool into far better then gold.
Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge. There had been a forge here long before there was a castle, long before there was even a kingdom. There were horseshoes everywhere. Iron had entered the very walls. It wasn’t just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn’t speak the words here, you couldn’t speak’em anywhere.
Even so, she’d rather not.
“You know,” she said. “The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.”
“What?”
Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.
Jason’s frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as sunrise.
“Them?” he said. “But aren’t they nice and—?”
“See?” said Nanny. “I told you you’d get it wrong!”
-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
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