Gateways
- Karen Mayo
- Jun 20
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 12
A Point to Leap Off From
Recently, while revisiting work created during my Master's in Public Art, I found myself reflecting on a project called Gateways.
The work involved installing projectors in stairwells and overlooked spaces throughout the city of Melbourne, projecting moving images of sky and drifting clouds into places where light and openness had long since disappeared behind concrete, steel, and towering buildings.
The intervention itself was simple.
A dark stairwell.
A projection of the sky.
A moment of discovery.
Yet despite its simplicity, the work remains one of the most significant projects I have created.
Not because of the projection itself.
But because of the question that sat beneath it.
At the time, much of my theoretical research centred on a single inquiry:
How can an artwork create a moment of presence? A point to leap off from for the viewer.
Looking back now, I realise that this question has quietly accompanied me throughout my entire creative practice.
In Gateways, people moving through the city would unexpectedly encounter an opening to the sky. For a brief moment, their attention shifted. The familiar became unfamiliar. The ordinary became extraordinary.
People paused.
Looked up.
Became aware.
What interested me was never the image alone. It was the experience that emerged through the encounter. The stairwell remained physically unchanged, yet the experience of being there was transformed.
Over time, the materials and visual language of my work have evolved, but the underlying inquiry has remained remarkably consistent.
Whether working with projected video, photography, installation, light, movement, or abstraction, I continue to explore how an artwork might interrupt habitual ways of seeing and create an opening for experience.
Not an answer.
Not a conclusion.
But a threshold.
A gateway through which the viewer can enter their own reflections, memories, perceptions, and possibilities.
When I look back at works such as Gateways, and forward to more recent projects such as Changing Spaces and Evolution, I can see that they are all connected by this same desire: to create moments of awareness that invite us to pause, reconsider, and experience the world differently.
Creative practices rarely move in straight lines.
The questions that matter most often remain with us, resurfacing through different forms and at different stages of our lives. What changes is not necessarily the question itself, but our understanding of it.
Revisiting Gateways has reminded me that some of the most important discoveries are not found in creating something new.
They are found in recognising the threads that have been there all along.
— Karen Mayo
Gateways - A Point To Leap of From...
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