Through the Glass
A collaborative visual art project exploring perspective, distance, visibility and control through layered images, miniature scenes and installation.
About Through the Glass
How can the same experience look different depending on which side you are standing?
Through the Glass brings together people with experience of the justice system to explore how our understanding of an experience changes depending on our position, what we can see and what remains hidden.
What becomes visible?
What remains hidden?
Who has control over what we are allowed to see?
The project is part of RESHAPE, a programme of creative sessions that brings people with experience of the justice system together with artists and creative practitioners to explore questions about justice. Through different approaches to making, the group will share ideas, challenge perspectives and imagine how justice could be different.
Through the Glass will begin with members of Unbound, Vox Liminis’ ongoing creative community, which brings together people with diverse experiences of the justice system, including people who have been in prison, their families, artists and people working in justice. Together, the group will draw on their different experiences and perspectives to explore how people are seen, heard and represented within the justice system.
Working with photography, transparent materials, words and everyday objects, participants will create miniature scenes that can be viewed from different perspectives. Layers of acetate, tracing paper and images allow people to experiment with distance, barriers and visibility, revealing or concealing different parts of their work.
Beginning with individual scenes, people will explore their own ideas and make creative decisions about what is visible and what is hidden. These scenes become the starting point for conversations and shared artworks, bringing different voices and perspectives into the same space.
As the project develops, people will explore how changing the position of an image, introducing a barrier or altering the viewer’s perspective can transform the meaning of a scene. By changing what can be seen from different positions, we create space to explore how our understanding of an experience is shaped by what we know, what we don’t know and whose perspective we are looking from.
Through collaborative making and experimentation, the group will consider how these individual works might develop into a larger installation.
Within the justice system, people’s experiences are often understood through different and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Through the Glass creates space to question who gets to tell their story, whose perspective is heard, and how institutions can shape what others see and understand.
Through the Glass explores how experimental art making can challenge our assumptions and deepen our understanding of different and complex experiences. It asks what happens when we look at an experience from another position.