Windows as Apertures: Between Inside and Outside

Windows have always served as mediators between interior and exterior life. From the leaded panes of colonial weatherboard cottages to the floor-to-ceiling glass of contemporary gallery spaces, they shape how light enters a room and how a room reveals itself to the world. For a visual artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance, the window is less an architectural feature than a recurring conceptual device. It frames, separates, and yet unites; it offers a view while denying entry, and it carries within its simple rectangle a long history of thought about privacy, presence, and exposure.

Alexandra Mawimbi's practice has long been interested in how thresholds hold meaning. Her works often investigate the porousness of the body, the politics of visibility, and the rituals that allow one space to speak to another. The window, in this sense, is a recurring motif that recasts the simple act of looking as an ethical negotiation. Whether through fabric, glass, or the silhouette of a figure behind a screen, she returns again and again to the moment when inside becomes outside, when the private flickers toward the public, and when the frame itself becomes an active participant in what is being seen. Her studio, based in Sydney, sits within a coastal culture where indoor and outdoor life constantly mingle, and this daily negotiation informs the questions she brings into the gallery.

Across her sculptural and two-dimensional work, Mawimbi explores what she has called living presence, the felt sense that something is here, breathing, in the room. The window offers a structural language for this concern: it is a barrier that nonetheless allows the exchange of air, light, and gaze. This essay traces how the window functions in her art as both frame and aperture, threshold and exposure, and how such thinking resonates with viewers in Australian cities where interior and exterior life are knitted tightly, from harbourside studios to suburban verandahs.

The threshold as an inherited form

The window as artistic subject has a long lineage. Dutch interior painters transformed the leaded pane into a meditation on domestic life and spiritual longing, while twentieth-century photographers used the window frame to compose portraits that carried the weight of unspoken histories. Mawimbi draws on this inheritance knowingly. Her works on paper and her sculptural installations often refer back to the framing logic of Renaissance perspective, where the picture plane behaves like a window opened onto an ordered world. She treats this inheritance as something to be respected and unsettled at the same time.

In her own practice, the inherited form is rarely reproduced intact. Instead, she disassembles it. In one series, the wooden mullions of a sash window are stretched into a lattice that drapes across the floor, losing their vertical certainty and becoming a soft field for the body to cross. In another, the lower sash is replaced with woven strips, gesturing toward the cloth screens and curtains used in many West African domestic interiors. The window stops behaving as a stable rectangle and becomes a permeable membrane, a thing that holds shape but invites disturbance. The result is a frame that remembers its own history while refusing to remain in it.

This attention to threshold forms also resonates with traditions outside Western art history. The carved screens of Yoruba palaces and the painted house fronts of coastal towns both treat the wall as something that can be partly opened, partly concealed, a surface that knows it must mediate between a family and the street. Mawimbi's research into African textile influences sits within this wider conversation about porous surfaces. Her work suggests that any honest frame must also admit the wind, the noise, and the neighbour's voice, and that this admission is part of what makes the frame meaningful rather than incidental.

Glass, light, and the politics of clarity

Glass is the material most associated with windows, and Mawimbi uses it deliberately, sometimes directly, sometimes only as a reference. In some installations, panes of antique glass are suspended from the ceiling at chest height, creating a low horizon through which visitors must step. The effect is disorienting: the floor seems to disappear, then reassemble. Light passing through the glass throws soft shadows of dust and small scratches onto the gallery floor, and those incidental marks become part of the work. The window here is no longer clean; it remembers the air that has touched it, and it offers that memory to anyone patient enough to notice.

Mawimbi's interest in clarity is not a search for transparency in the political sense, but rather an attention to how light behaves when it is filtered through a body or a textile. Her sculptures in resin and stretched fabric use the optical vocabulary of the window without its brittle surface. Light arrives softened, and what is seen on the other side is slightly delayed, slightly muffled, the way voices sound through a closed door. The work behaves like a curtain rather than a pane, and in doing so it shifts the meaning of the frame from exclusion to care. To frame a window is to acknowledge that someone might be inside, and to let that knowledge inform the look.

This approach finds a particular resonance in Australian galleries, where the quality of southern light is famous for its sharpness and its sudden shifts. At the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour, where the windows open toward the water, Mawimbi has shown installations that respond to the building's own frame. The harbour outside becomes part of the work, and the white walls inside become a continuation of that luminous field. Visitors feel less like they are entering a sealed box and more like they are crossing a verandah, that quintessentially Australian threshold between house and garden, between the considered interior and the changing sky.

Gaze, reflection, and the architecture of attention

To stand at a window is to participate in an ancient exchange. The viewer looks out, but the window also catches the viewer in its surface, returning their own face as a faint reflection. Mawimbi's two-dimensional works frequently exploit this doubled perception. Charcoal drawings depict figures beside tall apertures, and in the glass of those apertures one can almost see the smudged outline of an onlooker. The drawing refuses to let the viewer remain unseen, and the room becomes a place where being looked at is unavoidable.

The window in this context is a device for staging attention. It asks who has permission to look, and from which side. In a country where questions of looking carry particular weight, given histories of surveillance, immigration policy, and contested representation, this question lands with force. Mawimbi does not answer it; she builds the conditions under which the question can be felt. A painting of a window with the curtain half drawn is not a metaphor but an instrument, set into the wall and waiting for the right moment. The right moment, in her work, tends to be a slow one.

This staging extends into her performance practice. In one recurring work, she sits behind a translucent screen while another performer slowly draws a curtain across. As the fabric closes, the audience loses detail and gains atmosphere. The window has transformed into a soft event, a slow negotiation between seeing and not seeing. In a country whose public culture includes the long pauses of cricket, the patient rituals of weekend barbecues, and the slow unfolding of an Adelaide afternoon, this unhurried looking finds a familiar tempo, and the frame becomes a kind of shared breath.

Domestic memory and the Australian verandah

Few architectural elements capture the idea of inside-and-outside as clearly as the Australian verandah. Wrapping around weatherboard houses from Hobart to Brisbane, the verandah is a shaded outdoor room that admits the bush, the suburb, or the harbour breeze. It is a frame without glass, a place where the family is visible to the street while remaining partly sheltered. Mawimbi has spoken of growing up around verandahs and of how they shaped her sense of what a window could be: a generous, slow device rather than a sealed pane, an opening designed for sitting rather than spying.

Her installation work has occasionally taken the verandah as a direct reference. In a project staged in a converted woolstore in Melbourne's inner north, she constructed a long, low platform raised slightly off the floor, lined with striped cotton and lit by hanging bulbs. Visitors were invited to sit, remove their shoes, and face a tall cloth screen onto which a slow video was projected. The screen behaved like the railing of an invisible verandah, separating the seated viewers from a distant horizon of moving image. Outside the gallery, trams passed and rain tapped against the warehouse roof, and those sounds entered the work uninvited and unedited, becoming part of the frame's own weather.

This porous approach to interior and exterior also informs her smaller sculptural pieces. Some recent works consist of hinged wooden frames holding layers of dyed cotton, hinged so they can be set at slight angles on a table or shelf. At rest they read as closed objects, almost like small altars. Opened a few degrees, they breathe. Light moves between the layers and the dyed fabric glows. The viewer, leaning closer, becomes aware of their own reflected face caught between the panels. The window, scaled down to the size of a book, still insists on its old task: to hold two worlds in a single edge.

The body as opening: breath, screen, and living presence

In Mawimbi's most recent body of work, the window becomes the body itself. Performers stand within rectangular fabric frames, breathing slowly while sensors record the small movements of their chests. The data is then translated into gentle pulses of light behind the cloth, so that the screen appears to inhale with the figure inside. The window here is no longer a piece of architecture but an act of being, slowed down and made visible, an opening measured in breath rather than millimetres.

This shift from object to organism is consistent with her longstanding interest in mourning and living presence. A window is, after all, a record of absence as much as a record of presence. Someone stood at this pane; someone looked out from this side; the room on the other side is empty now. Mawimbi's recent work sits with that emptiness without rushing to fill it. The breath of the performer inside the frame is offered to the audience outside, and the exchange is complete even when nothing is said. The frame becomes a kind of address, sent across the small distance between inside and outside.

For Australian audiences, this slow, attentive practice offers a counterpoint to the faster rhythms of contemporary life. To stand before one of these breathing frames is to be reminded that attention itself is a kind of threshold. You choose to look; you choose to remain. The frame holds you there, gently, for as long as you can bear it, and the window once again becomes what it has always been: a place where two worlds learn to meet without forcing each other open.

Recurring forms across the studio

Materials that return, season after season

The full archive of Mawimbi's sculptural research, including her notes on how cloth and weave inform form, is available across the website, where recent projects, exhibition history, and studio updates are listed for visitors, curators, and collectors. Those interested in commissioning new work, scheduling a studio visit in Sydney, or arranging a viewing of available pieces are warmly invited to reach out through the contact page.