This book looks at the Protestant people of Northern Ireland by looking at the one thing they believe more than any other sets them apart, their faith. Using the spaces they gather in to worship as a metaphor we look at a group who are not wholly British, nor wholly Irish. As the name suggests in order to protest they are somehow defined by their otherness, but at the same time actively rejecting the outsiders gaze with responses like, "Sure there's nothing important to see here." To miss quote Gary Winogrand who said “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” That’s what we do here in this book, if nothing is important, let's see what nothing looks like when photographed.

The word Liminal means to be at or on both sides of a boundary, it refers to the beginning or start of a process. Liminal spaces are there to be moved through, like train stations and airports, they are not destinations of their own, they're the start of a journey that will take us somewhere else.


The photographs in this Liminal project are of sacred spaces, spaces where a community gathers to embark on a spiritual journey. A journey away from the cold and damp of this reality and towards a world of faith and eternity.
In these spaces we see the imprints and shadows left by the people who are embarking on this journey. As a railway station tells the big story of industrial revolution and man's battle to overcome the elements it also tells thousands of smaller stories of the feet that have worn down the concrete steps of the platform as they go about their daily lives. 


Liminal is a high quality limited edition hard back photo book withe 96 full colour pages. The book is punctuated by a series of short poems by Paul Hutchinson and a reflection by Bryonie Reid. With an introduction by author and philosopher Peter Rollins and a short essay on faith in the presence of absence by David Capener. 

We shape the spaces we live in, and in many ways the spaces we live in shape us. These photographs we look at the spaces shaped by a people who are both part British and part Irish, yet not wholly either.

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The word Liminal means to be at or on both sides of a boundary, it refers to the beginning or start of a process. Liminal spaces are there to be moved through, like train stations and airports, they are not destinations of their own, they're the start of a journey that will take us somewhere else.

“By opting for an empty space over an object, they sought to protect that which can never be rendered visible. Rejecting any positive images that might become a Golden Calf.” 

Extract from the book introduction Photographing the Void: Craters in the Clay of Being, by Peter Rollins

A cup implies both emptiness and fullness, absence and presence. It is nothing until full, and always-already something. Women have figured as a kind of nothing in two millennia of Christian thinking. Of course we too are always-already something. Thus, every nothing is a site in which something is already present, and if we care to stay and look, that something may become apparent. Nothing and something, emptiness and fullness, absence and presence, can co-exist. For me they are intimately entangled – indivisible, in fact.

Extract from Nothing and Something. by Bryonie Reid

The dust rests between the tightly woven threads of a stain-guarded, polyester-wool mix, designed-by-committee blue church carpet. The dust of years. The dust of ages. The dust of the faithful. The dust of the unfaithful. This is the dust of christenings, weddings, funerals, centenary memorials, dwindling congregations, organ fund-raisers, Christmas services and the week-in-week-out ritualisation of life in all its fullness. This is the dust of a thousand stories.

This is my dust; the dust of disappointment. The dust of the presence of an absence that may never have been a presence at all.

We live in dust. Dust is what remains.

Extract from, Very Little, Ultimately Nothing by David Capener

As the prayer extended to cover
the death of a faithful parishioner,

national debt and global salvation,

I wondered about

the purpose of

the blue string tied

taut to pew 33,

and what if I took

a pair of scissors to the tension.

Poem by Paul Hutchinson

The book contains Poems by Paul Hutchinson and essays by Bryonie Reid, David Capener and Peter Rollins.

More about the book here