LIMINAL THREADS

SPACE 1 - Side

Exhibition dates : 28 July - 9 Aug 2026
Opening reception : Wed 29 July 2026, 6:00 - 8:30pm

Liminal Threads explores thread as a material, creative method and metaphor; a scaffold and connective force linking place with embodied memory. United through a cartography of pattern, Lucy Buxton and Kylie Walsh present traces of their encounters with Ireland’s landscapes and waterscapes, during their residency at Watershed Studios in Galway in 2025. The two artists are bound by a series of synchronicities - ancestral lines and recalibration after significant shifts - all of which led them to meeting in a fishing shed-converted studio in rural Ireland. Through shared conversations unfolding alongside daily studio rituals and material experimentation, they began to map their creative paths alongside the lively currents of the Abhainn na Gaillimhe (River Corrib). The works presented in Liminal Threads emerged across international waters, life transitions, rupture and renewal, made in the liminal space between who they once were and who they are becoming.

Lucy |

Lucy Buxton is a Naarm-based artist and curator. Working across expanded printmaking, her work explores rivers and creeks as living entities, repositories of memory and regenerative sites. Lucy's work engages with more-than-human knowledges, fostering intimate and embodied encounters with the environmental, social and political nature of water. 

Lucy spent one month at Watershed Studios as part of the first year of her practice-based PhD, where she is researching relationships between play and the ways in which people relate to and care for waterways in urban environments. Through walking, drawing and slow-stitching water patterns into agar agar and gelatine-based bioplastics, she built a living archive of her encounters with the River Corrib. The outcome is a series of relationalities between more-than-human knowledges and the embellishment of human imagination.

Kylie |

Kylie Walsh is a Sydney-born (Garigal country) Canberra-based (Ngunnawal and Ngambri) fibre artist whose practice explores patterns, connections and colour through a hybrid weaving technique. Her work takes the form of geometric fibre 'paintings' that exist between textile and graphic art.

Kylie's residency at Watershed Studios became far more than an artistic endeavour. It provided space to reset, slow down, and reflect on identity, belonging, and ancestral connections, leaving a lasting impact in the months that followed. The work she presents in Liminal Threads traces this journey—from ideas first germinated in the studio overlooking the River Corrib in Galway (Gaillimh), to the refinement of designs during a transformative period spent by the River Derwent in Hobart (nipaluna), and finally to her new home studio in Canberra (Ngunnawal), where both artistic and personal growth coalesced, unifying the work across time and place.