These images are part of an ongoing project exploring the meaning of a recurring dream that I have. In this dream I walk through a dense garden into a house. I walk through the rooms that feel familiar and strange at the same time and enter through a door into another room full of shuttered windows. I open the shutters and see that the house is surrounded by the stillness of the sea. This is a garden and house I don’t recall ever being in, but it’s always the same garden, the same house, the same rooms, the same windows and the sea. This is a dream I know intimately. The images are fragmented and layered and suspended and then they dissolve and I wake up.
Presences Unseen
Through my multi exposure photographs I am trying to peel off the layers of this dream to explore the intricate relationship between memory and dreams. The multi exposure technique creates ambiguity with the layered images, and mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and the surreal quality of the subconscious mind. By overlapping two, three and sometimes four images I want to create a sense of uncertainty and a space between presence and absence, between dream and reality. I am trying to make sense of this dream, yet the whole story never quite emerges. Are these suppressed distant memories, or a creation of the subconscious mind? What do our dreams tell us?
"I want to create a sense of uncertainty and a space between presence and absence, between dream and reality."
These photographs should have different meanings for different people. There is no fixed narrative, but rather a feeling, a presence that is subject to the distortions of memory. Each photograph becomes a map to discover one’s dream’s essence, familiar, yet foreign. For the viewer it could be an abstract vision, an ever-changing feeling. At times the overlap and blending of images create a textured tapestry that feels intricate and expansive, and invite the viewer to recognize the familiar within the barely there. The images read as the in-between spaces for each individual. They can evoke feelings and provoke thoughts about the viewer’s own memories and dreams, blending memory, imagination and emotion to create a new story, a new dreamscape that feels both personal and universal.
