The Liminal Space

For artist Yuko Adachi, art transcends the reality in which we live. She creates from the depths of her spiritual understanding and translates those messages into her artwork. Creativity is unique for every artist, and that is what makes each process a fascinating void in understanding how art is created, as well as how it is interpreted and received by the viewer. For Adachi, the process of art creation comes from beyond what the eye can see. It comes from beyond simply getting inspiration from a tree or a landscape; it digs deeper and also connects to the unseen realms or liminal spaces that we, as humans, all have access to if we want to explore that metaphysical reality.

Process

“Universe knows and forgives” by Yuko Adachi.

Adachi’s process stems from her understanding of the balance between taking the time to complete a piece and the technical elements that contribute to this process. However, there’s also a significant component that occurs through Adachi’s spirituality. 

While some artists draw inspiration from their surroundings or travels, Adachi’s creations stem from the messages and visions she receives through meditation, channeling them into her mind and then onto paper or canvas. 

Adachi explains how she started her path as an artist:

“High school was a pivotal time—those were the years I truly began tapping into my gifts. Looking back, I now realize that I was already channeling higher realms while creating abstract art, although I didn’t yet have the words for it. I would lose myself in the process, locking myself away for hours, completely immersed, asking my family not to disturb me. When I finished a piece, I remember feeling something sacred had taken place… something beyond me. I would look at my own work in awe, sometimes even moved to tears, unable to fully comprehend that I was the one who had created it. I felt so proud, mesmerized, and humbled at the same time. The energy of the art I created filled me with so much light. Now, I understand that what I was experiencing was Lightcode activation. I was serving as a vessel/channel for something far beyond my personal self.”

The process of “channeling” occurs when you are in a heightened spiritual state, allowing you to see visions and hear messages of what is appearing to you, including ideas, colors, shapes, and textures. It's like a dream, but you’re not necessarily dreaming. When channeling, you remember what is being seen and heard, and then share this information with the world in your own way, allowing people to receive the information they are meant to obtain. 

One of the beauties of Adachi’s work is how intentional her pieces are. The themes can range from energetic protection to amplifying your own gifts to even our connection with the natural world. The artwork fosters a more profound sense of awareness of the seen and unseen as a human, and how these aspects assist us to become the best versions of ourselves and our fellow people on this planet.

Divine Connection

“infinite possibilities” by Yuko Adachi.

You will find that Adachi’s artwork connects to spiritual aspects that are part of the unseen world. Yet these aspects are meant to speak to the viewer about why they matter and the connection between what we see and what we do not. If there are aspects we do not yet see, then we should consider opening our minds to why these things matter.

She is an artist who sees what is within us and what is outside of us, particularly in terms of energy. It can be something as small as feeling inadequate to something bigger, like wanting to know your purpose in life, as both of these ideas are related to your own energetic power and relationship with a bigger force and calling. It is through her work that we can tap into those parts of ourselves that perhaps we hadn’t considered before, and how those parts interact with the universe through our own actions and the energy we carry within our bodies and auras, also known as energy fields. There is much fluidity to her painting technique, where even the smallest detail or texture has an intentional purpose behind it. There is a dance between the objects in her artwork, among themselves, through symbolic colors, and through symbols that are also hoping to stir something within you.

Adachi explains the connection to spirituality through her work:

“I love this question because, to me, art is spirituality. It is a divine tool. It is a visual medicine gifted by the Universe to help humanity express and communicate with the Divine. Art and spirituality are inseparable, just like the sky and the stars—one holds space, the other shines. As a Lightcode channel, I am fully aware of my ability and the cosmic responsibility that comes with it. In art school, we were asked to write an artist statement, and to this day, my core message remains the same—only my vocabulary has evolved to express it more clearly. “

Each piece has a strong sentiment behind it, prompting the viewer to consider how the artwork relates to its title. In “The Universe Knows and Forgives,” you see rich colors, as well as feathers, which can symbolize birds and angels; both beings are seen as messengers. But there’s also a watching eye overseeing the whole scene, and that can be seen as the all-knowing eye, or the eye of God, or the eye of the universe, which knows it all and sees it all. Yet the eye looks gentle and loving, as we imagine God to be, as a being who forgives our mistakes.

Symmetry

“Galactic rememberance” by Yuko Adachi.

The concept of “sacred geometry” is something that you encounter throughout Adachi’s work. It stems from a spiritual perspective that suggests God or a divine source creates through symmetry and geometrical shapes that are proportional and, of course, symmetrical. It allows things and energy to grow and expand in this way, as they are symbols of different energetic powers throughout the universe. For instance, the drawings known as “mandala,” which are prevalent in Hinduism and Buddhism, are geometrically derived with the purpose of showing focus on one point and then expanding outward from there. 

Studies suggest that sacred geometry is a crucial component in the creation of our universe, particularly through the interplay of lines and space. There is an underlying focus on geometry within each of these sacred geometry pieces in Adachi’s work, where the way lines are connected and the types of shapes hold a specific spiritual meaning and message. 

She says:

“I have always been a deeply spiritual artist, but a major turning point came in 2021, when I received a clear divine message: 'Bring Lightcode activation art to protect the homes of people on Earth.’ This was the first time I received a specific divinely assigned mission. In mid-2023, I completed Home Protection, a transmission encoded within sacred geometry to serve as an energetic activation and shield for those who welcome it into their life and their space. You can read more details about its cosmic transmission on my website—it’s a deeply powerful piece, not just for me but for those who feel called to receive its activation.”

Concluding Musings

“Natural Selection II” by Yuko Adachi.

Adachi’s pieces are so much more than meets the aesthetic eye. They speak to us at a soul level with a higher power that we cannot see, but we do feel, even in unexpected moments throughout our lives, through sadness or small miraculous moments. We can believe that there are greater forces at play, and that is what Adachi’s artwork is here to reveal to us.

She speaks about the purpose of her artistic journey:

“Coming from an artistic background with a focus on healing and elevation, I find it deeply nourishing to balance my roles as both an artist and a shaman. Serving souls through energy healing and my deep connection to crystals is both fulfilling and joyful, while creating art is pure bliss—nourishing and healing for my own soul. I need both worlds to stay aligned and balanced and to fully honor my energetic calling. For visionary and clairvoyant artists who channel higher realms in service of the light, I feel that shamanic work is a natural extension of their gift. When you’re working with energy, stepping into sacred space, and channeling Lightcodes from cosmic consciousness, you are already”

There are layers to us and this world we live in. If we choose to delve deeper into our understanding of humanity and our personal journeys, we can uncover a wealth of knowledge and truth about the energy we hold at each moment. This is an important truth that helps shape our journey, but we can also gain a deeper understanding by connecting to this energy and making the most of it, becoming better humans each day. Our outer world will always be a reflection of our inner work and the forces we work with, and that is where Adachi’s work comes in as a reminder of these aspects and how we can learn to honor them and work with them.

For more on Yuko Adachi’s artwork, please visit her website.

Today’s poems reflect a need to feel centered, which comes from what we see in Yuko’s work:

A Center

By Ha Jin

You must hold your quiet center,

where you do what only you can do.

If others call you a maniac or a fool,

just let them wag their tongues. 

If some praise your perseverance, 

don't feel too happy about it—

only solitude is a lasting friend.

You must hold your distant center.

Don't move even if earth and heaven quake. 

If others think you are insignificant,

that's because you haven't held on long enough.

As long as you stay put year after year,

eventually you will find a world

beginning to revolve around you.

These Found Objects

Artist Josh Stover creates his artistic environment from a world of his own. His art pieces are representations of how he chooses to portray a reality that sometimes it’s close to home, in a literal and figurative manner. He selects items that many times are related to a home environment, and ones that share that connectivity with the humans who interact with them. Stover is particular about his work and it shows in his practice and the meticulous details, from proportions to colors, you see in each piece.

Process

Stover’s pieces have an innate sense of symmetry and display this through dimension and space. Because of the mindful approach behind symmetry, the viewer can enjoy the details of each artwork. Each item within the art piece stands independently and doesn’t intertwine with another as much. Instead, there is a sense of sharing the space, and it is due to the space that each component is part of through its shape and color, and not one object overpowers the other. This symmetry and space between objects create a sense of harmony. It allows our eyes to focus on each thing present without overlooking something. It is as if saying everything presented matters and should be viewed equally as it is portrayed.

He explains:

My process starts by sketching out ideas on my iPad using Procreate. I like to plan out the layout and colors of the painting using that program so I don’t have to make as many decisions when I am in the painting phase - although I do like to add in some extra details as they come to me while I am painting. I usually paint or draw things that I own or want - vintage pieces I have saved online or items that we have collected in our home. I like including things that have meaning to me personally, like a book I like or an object I have collected.

Thanks to its simplicity, each item portrayed in Stover’s design style has a distinct sense of beauty. The color almost seems like an added feature to share the object’s place in the world. Shape and space take priority in the art itself for the sake of balance and a proportionate piece.

On Symmetry

Stover’s work is highly inspired by the geometrical, but it is also intentional about the proportion and placement of things in the artwork itself. He has an eye for what is interesting and what he wants to portray through objects that have meaning to him and that he enjoys collecting. However, his work is also sharp and allows for definition and proportion. He admits that lately, he has been more focused on those lines that create cleanliness around his pieces. Because of that, one can see every detail with more appreciation since it was placed there intentionally to be seen and acknowledged.

He talks about the evolution of his work’s technique:

I think my work has gotten more graphic and “tighter” over the past few years. I used to make work that was slightly looser and more painterly but lately I have been using a lot of tape and stencils to get crisp perfect lines. I like that process more because it kind of changes the way I think about a piece as I’m making it. It makes me simplify things into straight lines in a way that I enjoy. I started doing more drawings this past year and in my drawings I use rulers and stencils to build an image - I think this has had an influence on my painting style.

Deeper Meaning

To the people who consider artwork without people to be not as engaging, I will say to them that it is so because they aren’t looking in and around. They aren’t searching for the clues the art piece gives them; the same lesson applies here. Looking at Stover’s artwork, you are staring into a world that seems, at times, to be from another decade. I say this because there is such stillness that it feels as though these moments were captured in time for a reason, and that is to be remembered. The Art Deco-inspired design shows us colors that pop, shadows, and slight curves that can be appreciated. They declare a feeling of things that are, in a way, living because humans interact with them, such as a melted ice cream or a broken shopping bag; these items tell their own stories about their surroundings and those around them. There’s that human connectivity to feeling comfort when seeing a clean space with a piano and bird, or perhaps a feeling of fun and partying when seeing a stack of martini cups with cherries. These items help create moments that humans can remember and possibly consider memorable as part of our existence. So, indeed, these little moments and still-life items matter.

Stover says:
I’m drawn to mostly vintage items. I like chrome chairs and wooden furniture that is from the Art Deco to Mid Century eras. I like that they often have bold curvy shapes combined with straight lines. I also paint a lot of small objects and folk art that my wife and I have collected over the years. I sometimes make up furniture and objects too, taking inspiration from things I have seen. The most important thing I think about is the simplicity and the shape of an object when I consider including it in a painting.

Concluding Musings

There is so much beauty and depth under the surface within the details of Stover’s artwork. It could be how flowers were portrayed at a flower stand, which shares a lot about the people behind the objects and how they live, which is the key to leaning into that understanding with these lovely pieces. It is being open to learning more about the possibilities of what is, what was, or even could be in the future in the realities we see portrayed. If there’s a scene portrayed, it is because there’s more to uncover about the humanity behind those moments and the interaction between humans and the objects. Were they happy or sad? What happens next when someone interacts with this scene? It is all up to your imagination as part of the beauty in art, and these possibilities are endless.

To learn more about Josh’s work, please visit his website.

The following poem reminds us why objects hold memories for us, just like they do in Josh’s work:

Housekeeping

By Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs

wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,

the threadbare clothes. We work the magic

of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

We save what we can, melt small pieces

of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones

for soup. Beating rugs against the house,

we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading

across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw

the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs

out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.

I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,

listen for passing cars. All day we watch

for the mail, some news from a distant place.

Of Collective Consciousness

When we think about humanity, we are bound to encounter a sense of polarity. On one end, there is isolation and a sense of belonging on the other. Colombian artist Mario Arroyave is the observer of these vast stream-of-consciousness thoughts, and his artwork tells you why it all matters. From how we dissect our conscious thoughts, to how we choose to live our daily lives, these aspects add to the human collective we see in Arroyave’s work and around us.

Style

Arroyave’s pieces have an ongoing range. They are constantly evolving with every project he works on. He can show you so many humans or no humans at all. It matters how they are being shown to you, and this is where perspective comes into play. Where he wants you to see them from, through perspectives and angles, whether it’s people or abstractions. If they are elevated, or you see them head-on, or if you don’t see anything at all just ethereal colors, those perspectives say something important about how we view people, time, and space.

It is all about that interaction with perspective, where your attention goes, and what you decide it’s saying to you. If it’s far, it shows a collective sentiment where your understanding needs to be broad, and if it’s closer it’s a more intimate, focused approach to the subject matter.

Arroyave explains his thought process:

My creative process is closely linked to the person I am at the moment of creating…My first projects were characterized by the absence of humans in the spaces I portrayed, at that time it was very difficult for me to interact with others and this was reflected in my work.

People appeared as part of a personal process of being more social and this was mixed with some physics books that I was reading at that time where I was beginning to understand that linear time is human fiction and that in the end there are only interactions, so I decided to work on that approach and create timeless spaces where all events occur in the same singularity, and thus I began to weave the timeline series.

Deeper Meaning

There is an individual outlook on Arroyave’s approach that allows him to morph into his environment and what he wants to portray at any given moment. Even though his individualistic view is represented in the piece by showing, say, a tunnel-like vision in Dissections of the infinite, he also portrays collective consciousness, where he shows how everything can affect everything else through connection like in Timeline – Stand Paddle. These pieces fill the space and they have an element of a continuum. Life goes on, waves in the ocean keep moving, and people move on and go on, as well as time, regardless. 

He explains:

As beings we are in continuous mutation, personally, I like to think of myself as a snake that sheds its skin from time to time and this has allowed me to live multiple lives in this life, so art appears as a manifestation of each one of them, which in its uniqueness understand a different language.

Concluding Musings

Arroyave leads us into a world that exists as a particle in the grand universe. One that is constantly changing its reality in order to evolve and survive. Humans need connection with humans and other living beings, and many times that gets lost in modern times. But humans also need a connection to themselves as beings within the grand scheme of life and universal power. That’s a strong message that allows us to have a broader perspective and understanding of what it is to be part of collective existence while still holding on to our individuality.

He states:

The human is an organism, we are all human. Unfortunately, not all of us understand ourselves as such, everyone gravitates to their ego, answering for themselves, for their family, their friends, and their homeland…. but all within a relatively small ring. We do not perceive ourselves as the collective entity that we really are, there are a number of fictions that separate us from each other, preventing us from flowing like human tissue. As controversial as the very concept of family sounds, it is one of the pillars of this dissociation, from there the first barrier that divides us as a society is gestated. At some point I read in Plato's Timaeus a vision of society in Atlantis and how they articulated it in a system where the family nucleus as we know it did not exist, the children did not generate a bond with their parents, in fact, they did not even know them and so everyone they were a big family. This vision of society as a unit still exists in some indigenous tribes around the planet.

But if the recent years have something to show, it is that the need for collective connection is an emotion we all crave to an extent. Arroyave shows us what happens when we do certain things and how that affects us now and later. When we choose to isolate, connect, or ignore. The results are reflections of human needs at the time, and it shows us that reality is always changing and we are the ones who are making it happen whether we realize it or not. 

For more about this artist, please visit his website. The interview was translated from Spanish.

Today’s poem reflects Mario’s understanding of time and space:

Black Space

BY ISHION HUTCHINSON

For Erna Brodber

Be ye my fictions; But her story.
— Richard Crashaw

I can bring a halo

into the night cave, quiet

with music (do not ask the music),

to her shaded there

in the moon; her fine spectacles

steam their pond rings;

her animal eyes fix

on the lintel of the door

as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton

tree the breeze combs

white into a final note,

her diminuendo poco a poco ...    

Moon-afro, myself

outpaces me

in wonder of her.

She goes off and I seep

under the black sprout

of her house, to rise

a salmon bell on the hill

dissolving mild cloud fractals,

without grief or malice.