Multiple works by Sandra Selig feature in the ‘Wonderstruck’ exhibition, at GOMA until early October. Along with several of her enamel-on-spiderweb series of works on paper, in which she captures the unique, sculptural intricacy of the three-dimensional webs on a two-dimensional surface, Selig’s mid-air 2003 occupies a dedicated space in the exhibition. Purchased in 2004 with funds from John Potter and Roz MacAllan through the QAG Foundation, mid-air transforms the humble materials of nylon thread and styrofoam into an ethereal installation — one in which negative and positive spaces are equally important. The work points to the artist’s interest ‘in science and astrophysics’, and in ‘the elements of space and being that can be felt but not seen’.

During the installation of mid-air in the gallery space, Selig reflected on the evolution of the work’s staging, considering the solo nature of the endeavour when she first created it in her studio at Metro Arts in the early 2000s. The artist, who has since composed detailed installation instructions for others to follow, comments that mid-air is now ‘being installed by many people . . . it’s a collaborative work’, but notes that, despite the ‘sense of internal thought, that transfer of energy’ involved in collaboration, she feels that ‘the [original] energy I had . . . is still with the work’.
 

For Selig, appreciating the extraordinary in the everyday is important:

Something so familiar and ordinary can be completely expanded in your mind, to connect to something seemingly unrelated. I think it’s vital for people to feel like they can stop and absorb and think about something and maybe then drift back to it.

The artist’s works have a way of slowing us down and making us look more closely, as she does when in her garden and elsewhere, appreciating what’s around her. Selig adds that she spends ‘a lot of time in my garden . . . just looking and observing how creatures build things, and I became really fascinated by these spiderwebs’, which she likens to ‘drawings I could never make with my own hands’.
 

In the same way that wonder strikes at the intersection of viewer and subject, Selig is greatly interested in watching the energy that audiences bring to her creations: ‘Sometimes [my work] might seem disconnected from human presence, but this is ironic because [it] very much draws on [the viewer’s response] at the same time’. In the GOMA gallery space currently hosting mid-air, the exchange of energies between audiences and Sandra Selig’s delicate installation is palpable. And she particularly enjoys watching people see the work for the first time:

They enter the space and often there’s a kind of pausing and, I think, just [being] in that moment, and that’s really special . . . I love that. I wonder what’s going on in their mind, what they’re feeling at that moment.

Tamsin Cull is Head of Public Engagement, and co-curator of ‘Wonderstruck’. She spoke to Sandra Selig in June 2025.