Project 1: Sleep/Wake – My Routine

The first thing to rouse me out of my dreams is touch. I know then that it’s sometime between 6-7 and eventually I’ll have to be getting up. I keep dreaming a bit longer happy in the knowledge that at least I’m not the first person who has to leave the house.

One of my first conscious thoughts every morning is of a colour or a song. From the minute I wake up and my brain starts ticking over there is either one of those two things in my head. Because of this, I will definitely incorporate colour into my piece.

The next sense I have is of movement and this is what wakes me fully from sleep. Once my boyfriend gets up and ready for work I know its time for me to get up. The movement of his constant back and forth between rooms helps to kickstart my brain and I begin to hear the noise of my other housemate doing his morning routine.

As I slowly get more awake lists start filtering through my brain… thoughts of what I did yesterday, what I’m doing today and tomorrow. Where I have to be at what time. Food. When I can sleep again.

Without fail the first thing I do once I drag myself out of bed is to make the bed, as neatly as possible. I hate messy spaces so I like to tidy my room first thing to be able to put it out of my mind and concentrate on the day. There is nothing quite like climbing back into a nicely made bed at the end of the day. This is probably a habit I learned young, I was never allowed to leave the house if my room was a mess.

For my A2 piece I wanted to focus in on movement, dream/reality and light/dark.

Finding my starting point for this piece was hard. I wanted to explore a sense of coming back into your body from a “dream place.” For me I envisioned this as being the floor to ceiling mirrored wardrobe doors in front of my bed. I imagined it almost being like Narnia, the dream space is on the other side of the glass, like a parallel world that you enter in your dreams. The other side of this was when waking I could imagine consciousness coming back through the mirror and rejoining my body.

From this point of view I knew I wanted my piece to have a dream like quality. I worked from this to make the image soft and incomplete and in parts broken. I was able to achieve this effect using a gesso print and from there I incorporated my other terms such as colour and light/dark.