Statement

I try to capture different states throughout my practice, such as parasomnia, dreams, and confrontations with reality. Continuing from last year, eyes are a reoccurring motif in my work, used to symbolise discomfort, questioning, and access into oneself. A psychology paper entitled “The Interpretation of Dreams and Dreaming… Branching into Parallel Worlds and Hyper Dimensional Realms…” (Roy et al., 2022) greatly informed my practice; it was found that when an individual dreams, a new branch of reality opens and exists in a parallel hyper dimension. Every iteration of a piece of work throughout this year was a representation of a parallel reality; the process is therefore holistic, allowing me to create a visual world where everything is related and derived from each other in some way. 

Night Musings (2022), was a short-film following a girl between states of parasomnia and insomnia— blurring the line between reality and unreality. Loïe Fuller’s use of coloured gels in Serpentine Dance (1897) influenced the lighting set-up; Chantal Akerman and her affinity for liminal spaces (Hotel Monterey, 1972), in combination with Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘The Eerie’ (The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) “there is nothing present when there should be something” — inspired the seclusion of the character in Night Musings, and her interactions with an empty space. Reflecting on the film, I made a textual equivalent of the contents of the film by recording my handwriting, and subsequently layered this over the film, emphasising their physical separation from each other as events in separate realities, albeit occurring simultaneously. 

Continuing to capture stills from Night Musings, I laser-cut some thin sheets of perspex, onto which I screen-printed these stills, making my next work The Ritual (2023). This use of materials was inspired by Bridget Riley’s Fragment series (1965), while Janina Anderson’s three dimensional collage installation Cut-outs (2016) inspired me to exhibit the sculptures from invisible threads to give them some dimension. I originally intended for these sculptures to be life-sized, reminiscent of Cut-outs, however the laser-cut machine had size constraints; so, when exhibiting, I used a strong spotlight to create exaggerated shadows across the wall allowing the works to take up more space within the room visually. 

This led me to my next short film A Day in the Life of a Dream (2023), a project exploring the cycle of a whole day from morning to evening. I came across Nacht und Träume by Samuel Beckett; a play which made me think about the concept of the dreamer and the dreamt self and the interactions between them. The character in A Day in the Life of a Dream acted as the dreamt self, with flickers from the insomniac dreamer in Night Musings integrated throughout the visuals of the film. I made a prop for the nightmare sequence in A Day in the Life using the same laser-cut and screen-print technique as before. This time I used an eye rather than a figure to convey paranoia, moving the shadows to simulate a sentient being infiltrating my dreams. I exhibited this using three monitors and looped the video so the film on each monitor would stop and start at different points, creating repetition and distorting the temporal structure of the film. The act of counting one’s fingers on each hand is a way to check if you are dreaming, also referred to as a ‘reality check’. I implemented this into the film to heighten the feeling of distrust and insanity, and soon made some intricate CMYK screen-prints (Is This Real?, 2023) to emphasise the moment, misaligning the edges to create further visual distortion. 

Subsequently, I curated the exhibition Spaces Between Worlds at The Rising Sun Arts Centre. I was interested to see artists’ individual perspectives on reality, unreality and dreamscapes, and the ways in which these interpretations could interact with each other in a space. By having the exhibition in a single room, I had the opportunity to observe first hand how the viewer moves through the space and interacts with the works, aiding the organisation of my final degree show installation; a piece which will touch on the connecting of different realms through the eyes, the so-called windows into the soul.