For the past few years I have kept notes on works I have made in dreams, and on works I have dreamed I had made. They sit in my notebooks as descriptions, partial sketches, and occasional recoveries: drawings, sculptures, and objects whose medium I cannot quite describe on waking. A small number have been realised, including Wolf/Tiger and the Frozen Waterfall series. They form an ongoing chapter of my practice I have been calling Dreamworks, and I proposed to use the residency to extend it. The theme, In Praise of Shadows, drew on Tanizaki’s essay of the same title and approached darkness as a research framework.
One of the works I had planned to realise was Vanishing Point, a large-scale oil pastel drawing I had first seen in a dream some years earlier, and which had been waiting for a space large enough to make it. Finishing it was one of the main things I set out to do, and I did.
The rest of the residency took a shape I had not fully anticipated. I had finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea just before the residency began and moved straight into The Tombs of Atuan, which is set in a dark underground labyrinth. I spent the first weeks of the residency in that world, along with several shorter texts from the reading list, before moving on to the rest of what I had proposed. Something about the labyrinth stayed with me: another kind of interior, another mode of moving through darkness, another architecture in which visibility is partial by design. It moved my thinking sideways, from the dream toward the labyrinth as a related figure.
Out of this came a proposal for an exhibition set inside a labyrinth, with moments of light breaking through at intervals, and a smaller version of one of those moments realised as Window: a found window frame installation reconstructing the summer evening sunlight on my living room curtains, with shadows cast from the bougainvillea outside. A handful of smaller drawings came out of the same thinking.
