dream skeletons  (2025 – )

dream skeletons  (2025 – )

Pigments on paper
Various dimensions, (generally 21cm x 29.7cm and 29.7cm x 42cm)

Pigments include Conté crayon, graphite sticks, ink pens, wax crayons, watercolour, and occasionally; Golden Teacher mushroom spores, photographic retouching inks, rust particles, etc

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Rather than being drawings of nocturnal dream events, I draw dream skeletons from my sensing of the creative process that goes into dream making. At art school we learn that dream illustration – depicting what our dream ‘looked like’ – may elicit fun and slightly mysterious imagery. But, following our tutors’ guidance to hone our attempts at critique, we slowly realise that, as a subject matter for art, the literal illustrating of a dream’s content appears particularly reductive and superficial, a relational dead-end of solipsism, allowing no room for the viewer beyond passivity.

As an ongoing drawing series dream skeletons grows out of this awkward situation, partly as my nudging of a subject mostly perceived as vacuous and self-indulgent in the Global North. I’m fascinated by the awkward emotions elicited by dream-sharing in contemporary Western European cultures. Why the shame?  Elsewhere, dreamwork– the sharing of dreams with others, following carefully considered culturally-specific protocols – understands the dream as a vital source of both personal and collective knowledge.

My dream skeleton drawings act as ‘image moderators’ – a role and activity that runs throughout my work.  They emerge from whatever I’m able to salvage from my own recent nocturnal dreams. As I wake I try to retrieve, and then cohere, whatever I can remember from the previous night’s dream. But I also have an embodied hunch as to what might be missing from this memory, those gaps in the dream that I’m unable* to see into from my waking life vantage point.  Beyond the outer edges of this recollected assemblage of emotions, atmospheres, scenes and characters, are lingering traces of something else, lurking back in the dream’s present. That’s where the rest of the story lives, collectively hinting at something that is much more than story¹.  And I wonder whether beyond those ‘outer edges’ our dreams meet and entangle with the dreams of others. Including, of course, the dreams experienced by the viewer of these drawings. So, is this ‘outer’ space where the collective dream evolves from?²

As we wake we immediately attempt to translate our experience of the dream into a coherent narrative, hastily piecing it together as certainty about it slips away. Freud called this activity ‘secondary revision’.  The dream skeletons are my attempt to peer back into the furthest reaches of the dream before the filtering system kicks in, that translates dream vision into words.  I’m trusting that, somehow, the body holds the knowledge to shape that looking.  My drawing process senses, or abstracts, the forms and structures of these missing elements, parts that exist only in the state of sleep, glimpsed from inside those salvaged dream fragments, snagged in our waking memory.

Drawing them creates a membrane of capillaries, a weave, matrix, mesh, networks, or nervous system. As weave; there is a long cross-cultural history of a multiplicity of relationships between weaving and dreaming,  from the art of Iban Pua Kumbu sacred textiles, to Senegalese Toucouleur weavers. As nets; I hope that each act of drawing the dream skeletons ‘rewires’ a part of my consciousness, so that it might then gather more events from my next dream to bring into waking life.  They also resemble the biomorphic mesh structures that my father kept drawing in the margins of books he was reading, in the weeks leading up to his death from cancer.  He told me that they were Mogums³, spirits who regularly visited him in his hospice. He drew one of these visionary beings in his book of Edwin Muir’s poems, next to The Ballad of the Flood, which begins “Last night I dreamed a ghastly dream,…”.

Immediately before I begin the drawing – which mostly requires an empty head –  I try to sense intention.  I do this through trying to embody the emotional tone of the dream, speculating what waking affect did the dream ‘want’ to shape in me. Next, I try to silence the irritatingly chattery bit of my mind and just act, using my body, holding whatever mark-making tool I’ve picked up in that moment.  I sense the movements my hand wants to make, generating a path of lines, making different tonalities of pigments.  My attention is restricted to these small events in relation to what my eyes witness unfolding. Both the generating of our dream’s content and our ‘seeing’ of this imagery appear to occur in the same moment, as autopoiesis. Similarly, the collaboration between hand, mark, and eye in order to draw the dream skeletons feels as though it is all acting simultaneously. But in reality this experience, understood as self-contained ‘self-making,’ is actually a sympoiesis (Haraway), a making-with, flowing from a looking that creates consciousness, through an ecology of attention. 

In this way my drawings are partly created through a meditative state akin to Surrealism’s ‘automatism’. They are also aligned with early 20th C. Surrealist artists’ highly complex, mutable and diverse relationships with the revolutionary, liberating potential of the dream; summoning the unconscious to challenge the dominant culture of normative anthropocentric rationality with its destructive and divisive impulses. My affinities avoid the posturing, crowd-pleasers of Dali, Magritte and the other popular lads, and instead lie with the deep, introspective work of artists such as Maya Deren, Ithell Colquhoun, Max Ernst and others⁴ . dream skeletons are also inspired by artefacts made from tight matrices⁵ of parallel and perpendicular lines; from cross-hatching in engraved prints, to woven baskets and ikat patterns. But also the structures of lead calmes in sacred stained glass windows, root systems, lichens, rock formations, flints, crystals, seed pods, seeds, jelly fish, bodily organs, cells, and microscopic organisms.

My eyes alert me that the drawing quickly ‘goes wrong’.  Therefore, a lot of the working through, thinking by, and marking out, is my bodily response to this capacity for the drawing doing its own thing. By modifying a line, a mark, an angle, in space I might be able to bring it to rest, or instead towards a state of dynamic and energetic poise. Either way, eventually, it becomes itself, growing up and standing on its own two feet, now rejecting my guidance. The drawing becomes more than me, now embodying the part of the dream that is too slippery to be grasped. Although, as I’m slowly learning, everything to do with dreams is influenced by a contagion of slipperiness.  Reciprocally, creating these drawings in waking life, subtly shapes aspects of my dreams. Sometimes a slippage occurs in the form of unusually obvious ‘continuity errors’, while other dreams may include a glitch, like clipping in video games.

I can’t exactly remember when I began the dream skeleton drawings, but perhaps 2008-ish?.  Initially it was quite a sporadic activity that I kept in the sidelines. But since working on The Dreamshare Seer it has become an essential daily ritual, redressing that project’s evolving state of digital complexity and intangibility by doing something that feels very different, so simple, spontaneous, material and haptic. The drawing process doesn’t take long – mostly no more than an hour. Sometimes that is enough to complete it, others take several days. But it’s important that it is part of my day, every day, looking back into the night.

In relation to the rest of my work, these drawings and my act of making them activate a compensatory process, as described by Jung. They emerge attempting to rebalance my body of work, hoping to achieve its equilibrium.  Indeed, dream skeletons share characteristics – especially formally and structurally – with works as diverse as  Meetings (1999 -),  Settlement (2004), Mask Filters (2004 – ), and Jengkuan (2023) and even an early sculptural series, Secretors (1993-).

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*:  “..there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown” Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 525.
I’m trying to equate this notion of a tangle which reaches down into the unknown, with an encounter we experience in the creative process of making art, and viewing art; a resistance to “the revenge of the intellect upon art”  (cf: Sontag, S. (2009) Against interpretation and other essays. London: Penguin Books. p.7), and also in relation to the black box of AI.
While drawing the dream skeletons I’m sometimes aware of making marks so erratic and idiosyncratic to elude the predictive capacities of Generative AI’s image making. However, conversely I’m also partly trying to embody AI’s apparently spontaneous making process. It follows then that the dream animations generated by The Dreamshare Seer can be considered as a form of sketch. 

¹: For a hyper-associative exploration of perception, vantage points, over-looking, blindspots etc.,; “Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs sticking out from it all!“, by Adam Chodzko (2023).

²: I’m currently working on a practice-led PhD, with my ongoing project, The Dreamshare Seer, at its core.
Translated into lugubrious academic language for the PhD’s abstract, I’m exploring;  “The Dreamshare Seer – dreaming in relation: Contemporary Visual Art Practice, Collective Imaginaries, and Ecological Connection. How might contemporary visual art practice, as both a method of inquiry and a site of transformation, create and explore collective dream visualisation sharing in place-based communities to cultivate relational ecologies across human and nonhuman spheres, in dialogue with AI imagery, indigenous dreamwork, and theories of the unconscious?”

³: Mogums…; this seems to be a word he invented. A combination of golum, a creature from Jewish folklore, and perhaps the Magen David, a hexagram. Although my father was Roman Catholic he was fascinated by Judaism, and at the time was reading a book about the reclusive Jewish autodidact David Rodinsky. Once when visiting my father in the hospice, I happened to have a large pad of wire wool in my bag. He noticed it and asked delightedly “is that the mogum?”  I like to think that my dreams skeletons are also mogums.

^4:  Not necessarily “Surrealists”, but particular works by eg., Wilhelmina Barnes Graham, Lynd Ward, Etel Adnan, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilfredo Lam, Hildegard von Bingen, Graham Sutherland, Hilma af Klint, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Paul Nash, Arthur Rackham, etc.

^5: The drawings as a matrix alludes to Gordon Lawrence’s methodology of the Social Dreaming Matrix, which created specific non-hierarchical protocols for dream sharing within a group. His choice to call it matrix partly derives from its Latin origins (from mater: mother) fundamentally meaning womb, a pregnant animal, or a source/origin, ie; referring to something that gives rise to or develops another thing.

(NB: The dream skeleton series began in 2008, but is archived here from 2025. To keep track of them, I subtitle each drawing with the first name of people I’ve known, or know –the first person who wanders into my head, upon waking.)