The Stairwell as Passage: Ascent and Descent

A stairwell is a practical structure with an unusually rich emotional charge. It carries bodies between floors, yet it also stages hesitation, arrival, withdrawal, pursuit and return. Its landings interrupt movement; its rails offer support; its narrow flights make every footstep audible. In visual art, the stairwell can become a passage through memory, grief and changing states of presence.

Alexandra Mawimbi’s practice is well suited to this architecture of transition. Across sculpture, two-dimensional work, video, performance, sound and installation, her work considers how representation is formed and unsettled. The stairwell gives those concerns a physical setting: a place where the visible and the concealed, the public and the private, the upward and the downward are held together.

Stairwells As Thresholds

A threshold is often understood as a line between two spaces, but a stairwell complicates that definition. It is a volume rather than a border, a vertical corridor that delays the moment of arrival. A person entering it has already left one room but has not yet reached another. This suspended condition makes the stairwell a compelling site for an artwork concerned with transformation.

The movement through such a space is rarely neutral. Ascending can suggest aspiration, access or effort, while descending may evoke return, retreat or an encounter with what has been left below. These readings are unstable, though. A climb can become exhausting and involuntary; a descent can offer relief. The same flight of stairs may carry different meanings depending on the body, the direction and the memory attached to it.

In installation, this threshold quality allows the artwork to extend beyond an object. The work can occupy a landing, alter the route through a building or place viewers in a position of partial knowledge. A fragment glimpsed above may invite pursuit, while a sound from below can make the unseen feel immediate.

Vertical Time And Repeated Movement

Staircases organise time through repetition. Each step resembles the one before it, yet the body changes slightly with every movement. Breath becomes more noticeable, the rhythm of walking shifts and the distance from the starting point accumulates gradually. Unlike a lift, which compresses vertical travel into seconds, stairs make duration tangible.

This measured pace is important for an exhibition audience. In a gallery, visitors may move quickly from one work to another, pausing according to habit, interest or social expectation. A stairwell changes that behaviour. Its dimensions prescribe a slower route, and its landings create small moments of suspension. The viewer cannot take in the whole passage at once, so perception develops sequentially.

Video can extend this sense of duration through loops, repetition and delayed revelation. Sound can make an empty staircase feel occupied, even when no figure appears. A sculpture positioned at the turn of a flight may register as an obstacle, a witness or a body encountered in passing. Two-dimensional work can interrupt the vertical field with images that seem to rise, fall or remain fixed while the viewer moves.

This relationship between repetition and difference echoes the way memory works. A recollection returns, but never in exactly the same form. The stairwell becomes a model for that process: familiar yet altered, ordered yet unstable, carrying a person through a sequence that cannot be reversed in quite the same way.

The Body In Transit

The stairwell makes the viewer conscious of their own body. The hand may search for a banister, the feet may adjust to an unfamiliar rise, and the shoulders may turn when another person passes. Even an ordinary walk becomes a choreography of balance, proximity and negotiation.

Performance can bring these actions to the foreground without turning them into spectacle. A performer’s pause on a landing, a repeated ascent or a descent performed with unusual care can expose the social rules embedded in architecture. Who has the right to move freely? Who is expected to wait? What happens when a passage designed for efficiency becomes the location of vulnerability?

These questions are especially relevant in Australian public and domestic buildings, where stairwells are shaped by access requirements, fire safety rules and practical circulation. The National Construction Code influences the width, enclosure and emergency function of many contemporary stairways, while older buildings may carry more visible traces of adaptation. A stairwell can therefore reveal the tension between architecture as regulation and architecture as lived experience.

For visitors in a Sydney apartment block, a Melbourne arts venue or a regional gallery, the emergency stairs may be familiar as a place passed through quickly, often with a coffee in hand or a phone held close. Art can slow that habitual movement and make the ordinary route perceptible again.

Light, Sound And Partial Visibility

The stairwell is often defined by incomplete vision. A person on one landing cannot see the entire flight, and a doorway may conceal more than it reveals. This partial visibility provides a strong structure for installation, where an artwork can unfold through glimpses rather than immediate disclosure.

Light changes the emotional temperature of the passage. A bright strip beneath a closed door may suggest activity beyond the frame. A dim landing can make a familiar handrail appear uncertain. Shadows cast by sculpture may shift as viewers climb, producing images that belong neither to the object nor to the wall alone.

Sound is equally powerful because it travels around corners. Footsteps, ventilation, distant voices and the scrape of a door can create a layered acoustic field. A sound work placed below the viewer may seem to pull the body downward, while a voice above can generate anticipation. Silence, when carefully held, can be just as active: it asks the viewer to listen for evidence of another presence.

An artist’s use of sound and moving image can turn the stairwell into an instrument. The architecture supplies reverberation, interruption and distance. The audience completes the work by moving through these conditions, carrying fragments of sound and vision from one level to another.

Mourning And Living Presence

Vertical movement can describe the experience of mourning without reducing it to a single symbol. Grief includes absence, return, repetition and the desire to reach what cannot be reached. A stairwell makes those tensions tangible. The body continues to move, while the mind may remain fixed on a person, place or moment that is no longer accessible.

A landing can function as a site of suspension, neither destination nor departure. It may hold a photograph, a garment, a cast form or an empty area where an object is expected. Such gestures can make absence felt without illustrating loss directly. The work leaves room for the viewer’s own associations rather than prescribing a complete narrative.

At the same time, mourning is not only about disappearance. It can involve the persistence of touch, voice, habit and physical memory. A repeated action may keep a relationship active; a recorded voice may occupy a room after the speaker has left it. This is where the idea of living presence becomes important. The absent person is not restored, yet traces continue to act on the present.

The stairwell supports this double movement. It is a place of departure and return, but also of ongoing passage. Its steps hold the pressure of many bodies, and its surfaces gather marks over time. In that sense, the architecture becomes an archive: quiet, public and continually renewed.

An Australian Scale Of Passage

Australian cities offer varied stairwell environments, from heritage terraces and post-war apartment blocks to converted warehouses and new cultural precincts. In Melbourne, an old industrial building may retain a narrow concrete stair while accommodating studios, galleries and offices. In Sydney, dense apartment living can make the fire stair one of the few shared spaces residents encounter without the polish of a lobby. These settings give vertical passage a distinctly everyday character.

The local art market also shapes how such work is encountered. Australian galleries and artist-run spaces often present installations within repurposed buildings, where a work may extend into corridors, foyers or service areas rather than remain within a neutral white cube. Visitors accustomed to checking a venue’s programme online, meeting friends for a quick coffee nearby and moving between multiple openings may experience the stairwell as part of the exhibition’s social geography.

Legislation matters as well. The Copyright Act 1968 protects an artist’s creative work, while moral rights support attribution and protection against derogatory treatment. Documentation of a performance or installation is therefore more than promotional material; it becomes part of the artist’s professional record, carrying questions about authorship, context and how a work is represented after its physical presentation has ended.

For a practice spanning sculpture, image, video, performance, sound and installation, a carefully organised archive provides continuity across these forms. Alexandra Mawimbi’s archive allows the work to be approached through documentation while preserving the sense that each project belongs to a wider, evolving body of thought.

Reading The Passage Through Art

The stairwell can be approached as a formal structure, a social space and an emotional instrument. Each perspective changes what becomes visible. A handrail may be read as a compositional line, a safety device or a record of touch. A landing may be a pause in circulation, a stage for performance or a place where grief becomes momentarily legible.

For audiences encountering this idea in a gallery or online archive, several details can guide attention:

• Notice where the work interrupts movement.
• Listen for sounds arriving from outside the visible frame.
• Observe how light changes across landings and surfaces.
• Consider whether ascent and descent feel voluntary.

The artist’s wider field also matters. Sculpture gives presence a weight and outline; two-dimensional work can hold an image at a fixed level; video introduces duration; performance activates the viewer’s awareness of gesture; sound makes distance perceptible; installation draws these elements into a shared environment. The stairwell is therefore less a subject than a framework through which different media can converse.

Useful questions for close looking include:

• What is hidden by the architecture?
• Which body is imagined as moving here?
• Does repetition create comfort or unease?
• Where does absence become physically present?

This approach avoids treating ascent as automatically hopeful or descent as inherently negative. A staircase is more ambiguous than that. It can make progress feel burdensome, make retreat feel necessary or turn an everyday journey into a ritual of attention. Its meanings emerge through the encounter between structure, artwork and viewer.

The relationship between spatial practice and documentation can be explored through wider curatorial contexts such as CODA’s programme, where drawing, installation and interdisciplinary approaches demonstrate how an artwork can remain materially grounded while opening into movement, memory and place. Such contexts help position the stairwell within a broader history of artists working with architecture as an active medium.

To enter the stairwell as an artwork is to accept a change in pace. Follow the turn of the flight, register the interval between floors and attend to what appears only briefly. Explore Alexandra Mawimbi’s portfolio, spend time with the documented works and let ascent, descent, sound and stillness reshape how a passage can be seen.