Tools & material used:
Canvas fabric, Edding fabric markers, fabric paint, brush, sewing machine, dream journal
Time spent on project:
10 months, with 9 months of dream journaling
Exhibited in:
Bauhaus University, Weimar. 2017.
Through the intensive handwork and repeat labor done in its creation, the ‘Delirium’ room installation reflects on the fundamental ideas of The Quantitative Study of Dream, a scientific method of dream analysis invented in the 60s involving mathematical measurements and statistics. This method of dream analysis implements long-term dream journaling, repeat manual labor of writing, reading, coding, and analyzing. During the conception of the installation an exhaustive collaborative study was done to create a correlation between complex scientific dream analysis techniques and labor-filled artistic techniques. The amount of pattern-covered space transmutes the room into a space of obsessive yet reflective labor and organic handwork.
The whole installation inhabits a single-bedroom space around the size of 12m². The room, formed in its compositional approaches to convey the artist’s student dormitory bedroom in Weimar, features a bed, a computer table and a chair, window replicas, and a door replica. The installation was built from hand-painted and sewn fabric, fully covering the floor, furniture, replica windows and door, and part of the room’s walls. Covered in all blue patterns, the installation is a converging of physical and imaginable space, just as unconsciousness meets consciousness the moment a person wakes up from a dream.
A bedroom composition was chosen to represent the installation idea as a bedroom is both a mundane space and a very personal space, two characteristics that also belong to the experience of dreaming. The idea of using a new space to replicate the artist’s actual bedroom departs from the warped sense of psychological reality that is often felt in dreaming experiences, due to brain activities during our sleep. The installation offers a visual landscape of dreams or nightmares, where confinement of space and yet liberation of the mind to the point of the absurdity assimilate into a cognitive unity.
