Thresholds Collection

Sunday 26 April 2026

TLDR

• 32 hand-painted abstract maps paired with haiku, each one a coordinate for a crossing we all navigate

• 32 parafictional speakers shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience, who have inhabited my studio for over a year

• The first of two companion collections: Transitions follows in July 2026 with the same 32 voices speaking at greater length.

Thresholds is the fourth collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 32 hand-painted abstract maps, each paired with a haiku, each one a coordinate for a crossing we all navigate.

Maps impose order on complexity. They flatten the sphere, force the messy world into grids and projections, assign everything a category and colour code. They promise certainty, coordinates, the comfort of knowing where you are. For many of us, the territory remains uncharted. Gender, vocation, belief, immigration status, any passage where the internal contradicts the external. This collection is built for those crossings. It reminds us the official legend doesn't always match the journey, and that the experience of passage itself may become the only reliable evidence of transit.

Thirty-two parafictional speakers move through the collection: Shane, Mason, Jamie, Alex, Casey, Amara, Sam, Morgan, Kai, Riley, Jesse, Nikolai, Hayden, Priya, Cameron, Reese, Devon, Weilong, Rowan, Lindsey, Erika, Peyton, Elliot, Kiara, Finley, Bindi, Keith, Jude, Dylan, Wesley, Harper, and Ramsay. These invented personas have inhabited my studio for over a year, shaped by research, community knowledge, and lived experience. Their voices speak to transitions of childhood, belief, gender, vocation, death, immigration, identity, and separation. Others reference partnership, aging, and loss. Some describe bodies that exist beyond categorical systems, coordinates that don't resolve to any projection. Others recall deprecated maps they navigated by, routes that medical records don't document, passages where the legend simply stops.

Each voice is paired with a haiku: seventeen syllables holding the essential gesture of a crossing. Shane's haiku sits near the beginning: "Borders converge here. / Ground trembles beneath our feet. / We gather, then cross." The five territories: Approaches, Crossings, Ley Lines, Recollection, Dissolutions, are loose clusters rather than a prescribed path. Enter anywhere. Return often.

Where Leo & Neil and Emily & Sarah follow specific relationships, and Behind Closed Doors revealed 35 separate lives, Thresholds moves beyond named individuals into a constellation of 32 different voices. Everyone mid-passage. No one arrived.

Thresholds is the first of two companion collections. Transitions follows in July 2026, pairing abstracted portraits with conversational fragments: the same 32 voices, speaking at greater length. Together they will form a shared representation of the transitional state of our lives. The compressed truth and the conversational unfolding.

32 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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- Craig / Artipodean