Things That Cannot Be Seen in Any Other Way: Painting the Third Space

Abstract

This practice led research explores how painting can construct a third space that holds lived experiences of identity, home, and family. It is grounded in my position as both Māori and Syrian. The project responds to the difficulty of locating identity within a singular cultural framework. I position identity as something formed across and between positions. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’, I explore how an Oasis can operate as a conceptual and material framework for world-building within painting. Oasis acts as a constructed environment where memory, culture, and lived experience coexist in flux, resisting singular definitions of identity. My research questions how painting can make visible these lived experiences whilst allowing them to remain partial and not fully resolved. The project is methodologically grounded in everyday encounters of home and family, which function as both method and subject. Beginning with diaristic watercolour sketches and translating into large scale oil paintings, symbols and figures emerge through lived encounters and work as a visual language that holds experience without fixing it. Informed by Édouard Glissant’s ideas concerning the ‘right to opacity’, full transparency is resisted allowing meaning to remain partially hidden. Utilising installation strategies, I explore how paintings can function as thresholds that must be physically navigated. Viewers are invited to enter a space yet not fully grasp it.