GROVE CITY, OHIO — The Awesome Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Columbus-area autistic artist Elizabeth Newell, on view October 3 through November 21, 2026, with an opening reception Saturday, October 3, from 1–3 p.m.

New body of work explores liminal spaces, transition, overwhelm, and the hidden world between an artist’s inner and outer experience. Known for creating deeply personal, imaginative work that gives viewers access to an inner world often hidden from those around her, Newell returns to The Awesome Gallery with what she describes as her most meaningful collection to date.

The exhibition began with Newell’s desire to explore liminal spaces—the uncertain places and periods that exist between one state and another. For Newell, navigating transitions, endings, waiting, thresholds, and change as an autistic person living in a predominantly neurotypical world can be intensely confusing and overwhelming.

Early in the development of the collection, however, Newell experienced a major disruption in her own life. The experience transformed the direction of the work. What began as an examination of external liminal spaces became an exploration of something much more personal: Newell’s realization that her own mind and body can represent the most complex liminal space she inhabits—the threshold between her rich internal world and the outside world she must continually navigate.

“The most difficult liminal space I navigate is within myself,” Newell says. “It is the space between my inner world and the outside world, between my mind and my body, between what I experience and what other people can see.”

Through watercolor, acrylic, mixed media paintings, and sculpture, Newell invites viewers into that hidden world, where beauty and pain, safety and fear, confusion and wonder can exist simultaneously.

The exhibition is organized into three interconnected sections: “Disruptions and Endings,” “Waiting and Thresholds,” and “Processing, Transitions, and Transformations.” Yet Newell intentionally gives the collection no definitive beginning or end. The exhibition itself becomes a liminal space—one visitors are invited to enter, move through, and experience.

Rather than attempting to explain autism from the outside, Newell’s work offers something more intimate: an opportunity to experience the world through the perspective of an autistic artist.

The exhibition also represents another chapter in Newell’s evolving artistic practice. Her previous bodies of work have explored masking, identity, safety, resilience, imagination, and the relationship between her internal and external worlds. In this collection, those ideas converge around the ongoing challenge of finding enough balance and safety between the two to continue moving forward.

Newell dedicates the exhibition to her art therapist, Emma, whose support she describes as essential to the creation of the collection.

“This chapter isn’t being told with written words,” Newell says. “Instead, it can be experienced through my paintings and sculptures. I want to bring people inside my hidden inner world and show them both the beauty and the pain that coexist there as I try to find my way through life and keep growing.”