Threshold

Threshold

Maria Olsen’s Threshold is a large wall-based sculpture produced through a process of layering gesso-soaked muslin into a form that seems at once organic and foreign. An arch protrudes from the centre of the work, acting as some kind of passageway or architectural boundary. Around the arch, bones are scattered. Flecks of pigment—pinks, yellows—peer out from a dark, but slightly glistening background.

Olsen said little about individual works during her lifetime. In the few interviews she gave, she preferred to linger on process, or to gesture in the direction of a citation, without ever attempting to neatly illustrate an idea. When Threshold was exhibited in the 1984 exhibition Australian and New Zealand in Edinburgh, Olsen offered a series of passages in in the catalogue: one from Beat poet Neal Cassady, one from herself, and one from Indian spiritualist Meher Baba. Where Cassady writes of spectres and veils between life and death, and Baba writes of the capabilities of creative thought—“when man dives deep within himself he experiences the fullness of existence”—Olsen writes, “The situation I like is the moment of mirth before the laugh.”

Here, as elsewhere, Olsen tempers the spiritual, mystical, or morbid associations of her imagery with levity, locating her inquiry within everyday exchanges between people. But, even in laughter, there’s an element of transformation at play. A humorous vision or comment takes time to land, as it works its way through the body and mind, before breaching the surface tension of conversational decorum as an outburst of joy. The feeling escapes language. To call something funny, in hindsight, doesn’t quite capture the bodily mechanics at play. It’s from within the space of delay, between feeling and language, that much of Olsen’s thought seems to take place.

— Excerpt from Simon Gennard, “Thresholds,” in Several Degrees of Attention: thinking with the collection, 2022, adapted for Collection Online, 2023.