Although there has been extensive research into Shakespearean text and performance, visual responses (other than film) have received limited attention, and few fine artists have made a sustained engagement with Shakespeare. This series of paintings and accompanying commentary offer a lateral, imaginative response to the plays and their historical and contemporary contexts. My research is a visual exploration of ambiguity, liminality and transformation, investigated concurrently in terms of text, performance and painting. My primary context is Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which has provided a crucial contextual and conceptual focus. During a period as Artist in Residence at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, I observed rehearsals and performances, and undertook research in the costume and prop stores, library and archives. My study has been much informed and stimulated by literary and historical research, and a significant aspect of the project has been to create an interdisciplinary dialogue, examining how theory and practice, the textual and the visual, inform each other. Various strands of research have emerged through practical and theoretical investigation: ideas of past and present; magic, supernatural and the uncanny; ambiguity of identity; costume and disguise. My examination of liminal states, boundaries and thresholds has enabled me to reflect on, and develop, many of the preoccupations and problems that lie behind my practice: the nature of silence, the translation of movement, the power of stillness and empty space, the nuances of meaning and perception inherent in the androgynous figure, and, as an overarching theme, liminality of both the theatrical and pictorial space.