Liminal Landscapes
Orchid Gallery
The Lab at ConnCORP
Hamden
Through Jan. 9, 2026
How does an artist know when their piece is done? As I viewed her work in a group show at The Lab at ConnCORP’s Orchid Gallery, artist Louise Mandumbwa called from Zambia to tell me the two qualifications she considers.
If someone who knew the subject were to see the painting, would they recognize the person they love?
and
Is there space for the subject to grow?
“They’re still so young,” Mandumbwa told me about her two younger cousins Luwi and Luyando, whom she painted in her piece (An Etymology for) a Namesake. In the painting, her cousins, who are currently 5 and 16, are lovingly depicted in grayscale. Energetic, wide brushstrokes create the flow of each form—the tender swoop of Luwi’s cheek, the straight shoots of the plant behind her, and the soft light peeking through the gaps in the flora. Swathes of bare canvas and long sketchy lines let the painting breathe. “They’re still becoming,” Mandumbwa said of Luwi and Luyando. She was leaving gaps for them to change.
I walked through the gallery’s long hallway, watching Mandumbwa’s pieces interact with other artwork about place, nostalgia, and transformation. The show is called Liminal Landscapes, and according to curator niko w. okoro‘s exhibit description, it “grieves what’s been left behind and envisions futures yet to materialize, while reveling in the sites of liminality, or transition, that bridge the two.”
Yasmin Essafi‘s photographs from Cuba blur figures to create a snapshot of time itself, while Benita Nnachortam takes an experimental approach to the post-processing, screenprinting photographs and overlaying drawings so the shutter click is just the beginning.
A piece by Rebecca Fowke titled Mother is suspended with hemp string at all angles, making the central figure feel like a portal. Zajah Divine‘s works step fully into an inner world, with intaglio prints titled Her Image and Her Imagination. Kwadwo Adae‘s paintings use abstract Kente cloth patterns to reflect realities before, after, and beyond manufactured disorder.
Parts of Mandumbwa’s painting lay hidden, safe to develop beyond the realm of what could be seen. Looking into the blank spaces, I started to get a handle on what Mandumbwa meant when she talked about the “things I can’t possibly perceive about the person without it becoming fully about my projection.” I felt myself let go of the urge to draw conclusions, instead opening up to the experience of impossibility and the true nature of memory.
Mandumbwa seemed okay with not knowing everything. “Sometimes all you have is the approximation,” she said. At times, not even that.
In her other piece in the exhibit, Configuration 1, the image of a plant is split across two surfaces, one section rendering the leaves in negative space. Mandumbwa told me that when she thinks of this plant growing at the doorstep of her grandmother’s kitchen, she remembers everything around it but doesn’t always see the plant itself. So she painted it that way.
This was also the way Mandumbwa described her surroundings when she first picked up the phone for our conversation. Otherwise based in New Haven, she was in Zambia for her wedding, an extended stay that prompted her to “reconcile the things you remember and how things change.” Landmarks had shifted. Memories mapped unevenly onto reality. “Lulu,” the nickname Mandumbwa used to go by as a child, now meant Luwi and Luyando, the cousins she painted in (An Etymology for) a Namesake.
At some point in her time away, Mandumbwa had become Louise, like the maternal grandmother she was named after.
In the elder Louise’s garden, yucca grows alongside guava, mangoes, and lime. Plants serve as material evidence of contact, migration, and care. The elder Louise speaks Mbundu, from her birthplace of Angola, and Nyanja, a common language in Zambia, where she lives now. Born and raised in Botswana, the younger Louise speaks English but neither Mbundu nor Nyanja. This doesn’t stop the grandmother-granddaughter pair from having conversations in the garden.
“There’s something really earnest about trying to reach out to someone without words,” Mandumbwa said.
She approaches the gap in language, like the gap between the viewer and subject in (An Etymology for) a Namesake, not as a limitation but as rich soil for possibilities: “There’s a kind of knowing that’s built into your body, that starts where language stops.” Shared emotion, family characteristics, and relationships with the land allow Mandumbwa to speak with her loved ones across all barriers.
“We’re experiencing the world in very different contexts,” Mandumbwa said of herself and her namesakes. Her middle name is also her late paternal grandmother’s name, and the two younger Lulus are small enough that Luwi was the flower girl at Mandumbwa’s wedding.
Mandumbwa told me about naming practices that intend to bestow a person’s traits on the new generation. Some of these similarities aren’t noticeable until years down the line, or until they are viewed with the right eye. There are pieces of Mandumbwa’s grandmothers that other family members are able to see in her, the gaps in life experience filled in by a network of remembered contexts.
“I come from a part of the world that is still writing its history books,” Mandumbwa said. Her own endeavor to collect memories, whether from herself or others, is not one she takes lightly.
Mandumbwa takes a thorough, multi-modal approach to the research behind her art. She makes audio recordings of the people she paints, asking them questions about home, language, and associative meaning. Then she listens to the conversations as she paints.
When I asked what she is excited about, research was Mandumbwa’s first answer—seeing “if there really are multiple ways of knowing, multiple access points.”
The act of painting, too, can be a practice in remembering. Mandumbwa told me she has poor recall of faces, but that after painting someone, she is better able to hold the memory of their face in her mind.
Through her art process, Mandumbwa follows in her maternal grandmother’s footsteps across generations and geography. She told me about her growing collection of drawings, studies, and paintings and said, “I’m creating my own garden of things I want to hold onto.”
