Long ago a dear friend and I were discussing our childhood fears surrounding sleep. Both of us felt from a young age a certain anxiety in the anticipation of sleep as most children do. After all it was impossible to reason exactly where we went once we drifted off into that dark realm. All our belongings disappeared. The only sensation the darkness hadn't stolen from us was the weight of our limbs and the heaviness of being.
If we shut our eyes, the small beam of light emanating from the hallway hardly helped at all. The shadows cast behind us were so dense they seemed to pierce a hole in the wall behind us opening up to some unimaginable abyss.
I remember as a child imagining the limits of my imagination in parallel to the limits of space. I knew that unlike my four limb-ed body and my four cornered bed, and my box of a room, my imagination could not be contained. Before I learned to embrace this strange paradoxical place I feared it. At times I still fear it. Nikki feared this “place” too.
While I pestered my father for yet another bedtime story and reminded him to check in on me later, Nikki had a different solution. Nikki’s main fear was that once she had fallen asleep, she worried she would fall away from the world behind her. The walls would fall away, the room would fall away, and she could never return. As a remedy to this fear, Nikki’s father attached a rope to the bedroom wall behind her for her to hold onto as she fell asleep.
This image struck me so much so that I kept imagining it over and over. The idea of a thread which somehow bridges the place of the imagination and the actual body continues to inform all the work I am currently doing. A lot of my art making surrounds the act of surrendering in some physical sense to dream life or some false death. Although grave in subject matter, the images I create (or hope to...) evoke a sense of lightness and humor which veils the secretive nature innate to the absence of mind. Also by using the "silly" I hope to provide a transient sense of comfort for the viewer. The photograph, wrapped up in its own impossibility, is seductive.
In this new project which is currently without a title (one will swell up eventually I’m sure) I want to take a cue from Nikki’s story by recreating this rope in a sense. This will be an installation work where I will create an impression of a human form on a mattress. This form will denote the absence of the dreamer. What will remain will be an expansive blanket woven with braids of hair which radiate out from this impression and take on a body of its own, eventually swirling up into the corner of the surrounding room. This “hair blanket” makes reference to both the bodily and the imaginary. It becomes this ladder or bridge from the weight of being alive to the lightness tied to its beauty.
Although I realize that hair is a symbol lush with psycho-sexual associations, it also literally exists as a record of time. It is not alive and yet we live with it, tame it, and care for it. In waking life, particularly for woman, hair is a sign of sexuality as well as good grooming habits (nice hair usually is perceived as a sign of someone who has it “together”).
However during sleep this symbol transforms. Dreams, like memory, erase the sense of the present. In this context hair becomes a bodily tie to the past. By nature it is continual proof of a long line of dead cells. Hair stands as the prefect bridge to weave the dream body and the dream mind together. It is something to hold onto, like Nikki’s rope saving her from falling away. I intend to create a piece which speaks to the tightrope we ritually walk between existing in our bodies and abandoning them completely. I want to create a fragile thread between worlds which is both a monument as well as warning to the dreamer not to fall away completely.+++
In addition I plan to include a video in which a dreamer falls alsleep, then a twin dream body awakes while the dreamer continues to sleep (so there is the same person sleeping and then also waking and performing the following action) and ties the hair of the dreamer into the blanket. Then this twin body comes back into the original dreaming body and awakes. Then, the now waking person cuts herself from the hair blanket, and leaves the frame. This would loop.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2563/4020865942_525f0fbdc8_s.jpg
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