Abstract - ANN CARRAGHER

Abstract
This practice-based PhD investigates liminality as a spatial, political and embodied condition through sustained engagement with the contested border landscape between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland known as the Gap of the North. Situated within a naturally occurring geological corridor of mountains and hills, the Gap of the North has functioned historically as a passage, frontier and site of conflict, and today remains shaped by the legacies of partition, militarisation and unresolved sovereignty. The research develops a concept of liminality grounded in place, using the Gap of the North as both subject and methodological framework through which experiences of uncertainty, division and instability shaped by the border are examined.
The thesis approaches the Irish border as a deeply political product of partition whose effects are lived, embodied and inscribed within landscape. Drawing on theories of liminality, hauntology and post-conflict studies, the research explores how historical violence, disappearance and surveillance persist as residual forces within the terrain. The Gap of the North becomes a catalyst for site-responsive practice, generating interdisciplinary artworks and writing informed by walking, repetition, affective encounter, memory and material engagement.
The research is shaped by my position as a diasporic subject whose repeated returns to the border landscape produce an enduring attachment marked by trauma, partial belonging and deferred return. Practice emerges through fragmentary, intuitive and reflective processes that foreground witnessing as both ethical stance and method. The thesis situates this work within wider global contexts in which borders are increasingly militarised, displacement is normalised and colonial legacies continue to structure power and exclusion.
Positioned at the intersection of art practice, critical geography and border studies, this research offers a situated contribution to understanding border landscapes as liminal zones where past and present coexist, and where
questions of justice, memory and care remain unresolved but necessary to hold in view.