“all the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams”
-Elias Canetti
No one had told me that sometimes falling asleep is the best way to start something really important. In fact, I had always believed that sleepers were blind. That to close your eyes and ears off to the world was to commit socio-economic suicide. But we sleep to gain strength, to reflect on the things that keep us emotionally healthy, we sleep to be sure we can stand against the winds blowing in from tomorrow.
This year has been a considerate nightmare; considerate in its delivery of positive experiences and a nightmare because they happen to be my favourite type of dream. When we wake up screaming, sweating and disoriented in the dark, our minds become focused on one thing: illumination.
The saddest thing about this dream is that it will always be fleeting and the lamplight will never reach every corner of my room. I know already that I will forever be trapped in twilight, never again to be engulfed by the same dream but never fully awake from it.
And so my work this past four months has been lit by this twilight. I began trying to express the unrealities in a child’s perception of things, especially of unfortunate things, but have found even more unrealities in my own perception of things. If something is good, I yell at it, jump on it or pick it up because it's magic. Equally, if something is bad, it looms, personified as a winged thing. It would hope to destroy me, but that's why I picked up the magical good thing in the first place.
I would rather not kid myself or anyone else in saying my work is an exploration of the past anymore. The past has just happened to visit my present and let me play with it in the way I want to now, not then.
In the past, I was distressed, and so when the past came to the future I distressed it with steel wool. I no longer want my work to be inhibited by my “overwhelming intelligence and conceptual aptitude”. I want it to be reactionary and maybe a little emotional.
And I think I can illustrate this way…
