Elmley Marshes – Dream Incubation and Flight    (2025)

Elmley Marshes – Dream Incubation and Flight    (2025)

An artwork as: An Open Call for a two-day residency (18 – 20th June, 2025), sleep, and the release of its dream visualisations, as artworks into The Dreamshare Seer‘s Dream Cloud as part of  Vessels Estuary 2025.

This opportunity for a particular incubation of dreams was set within a cosy cabin, in the midst of the amazing landscape of Elmley Nature Reserve*, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, 75 mins from London.

The Open Call was widely publicised through arts organisations’ newsletters and art press including:
Art Monthly
LUX
Fieldnotes
ArtsAdmin (Arts Anchor)
Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
Cement Fields
Open School East, Margate.

This residency for dreamwork was part of  Adam Chodzko’s ongoing participatory public art project The Dreamshare Seer – launched in April 2024 – which visualises the shared nocturnal dreams of a community into moving images, for the public to discover these dreams’ commonalities and differences.

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Elmley Marshes – Dream Incubation and Flight (2025) is an expanded and co-created artwork in two parts: a socially engaged structure and the visual animation of dreams. The project offered a free dream incubation space to sleep in, offered via Open Call. The resulting dreams (as artworks), were released – their flight – into the The Dreamshare Seer’s Dream Cloud on the Summer Solstice  (21st June) to coincide with the launch of the Estuary Festival 2025.

Both aspects of this work push the boundaries of what an artwork might be; firstly, a space to sleep and dream in, along with the dreams incubated through this space, and secondly, how an artist might participate within an exhibition (ie; by inviting a stranger to stand in for the artist, and to consider their dream visualisation as artwork as their participation in Vessels Estuary 2025.).

This retreat was open to an emerging artist (working in any medium) currently resident in London, Kent or Essex. (“Applicants should be at a significant early stage of continuing their art practice, and between 2 years and not more than 5 years, out of higher/further education.
Priority will be given to artists who are currently under-supported in the arts and face barriers to accessing opportunities”.)

We received a lot of great applications, but in the end we selected Ashley Lim: a Queer Malaysian Movement Artist and Community Dance Facilitator based in Britain.  We’re not revealing their particular dreams, in order to preserve the anonymity used by all our dreamers.

The Dream Cloud only exhibits the dreams of people who sleep and dream on the island. But they needn’t necessarily live there full time. Elmley Marshes – Dream Incubation and Flight offered a free opportunity for someone who lived beyond the Island to be able to share their own dreams, dreamt from Elmley’s serene natural landscape, then uploaded into the Island’s collective Dream Cloud.

Research into the science of sleep has proliferated over recent decades to challenge assumptions that only waking life is worthy of study. Capitalist systems of oppression steadily erode our sleep via technological developments, 24-hour news cycles, and the drive for constant work. Sleep is conceived of as a problem to overcome. Access to adequate sleep — a sleep gap — is structured along intersectional lines of gender, race , ethnicity, class, and wealth. Yet, recent neuroscientific research demonstrates that sufficient sleep, and the dreaming it channels — as “informational alchemy” — are essential for the health and wellbeing of minds and bodies.

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From the Open Call form for Elmley Marshes – Dream Incubation and Flight :

What we’re offering;

Elmley Nature Reserve
Elmley Nature Reserve’s conservation practices and wildlife.

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*
With thanks to Grace Spooner, from Elmley Nature Reserve.