A community artwork for peace
Jennifer gave me five pillows with loads of dreams.
I put all the dreams in the sun and made 24 dolls with the pillow cases.
We are flying this Saturday to make dolls in Lisbon.
The dreams are very soft, a pleasure to work with, thank you very much Jen!
The long continuous stories and the small quick images that pop up apparently not related with each other, I love them both!
I opened each pillow Sia gave me, turned them inside out, took the core deep dreams, put them in the sun for many hours and washed the pillow cases which is the fabric I will sew some dolls. That’s what I always do.
The surface dreams- the first layer of the stuffing usually rough and stained- I throw them away, for hygienic purposes and also because we can consider them superficial dreams, we like the deepest ones.
They are in the window looking outside, they wonder about the world, they are ready to step out there.
I met Sia at the Lbtq D&D event last month. She promised me she would give me some pillows. We met yesterday evening and she gave me 6 pillows – hers, her sister’s, her best friend’s and her house mate’s- and 8 pillow cases.
She wrote:
‘Thank you for seeing beauty where other people see trash. Thank you for seeing potential where other people see nothing. Thank you for taking my hopes, nightmares, feverdreams, flights of imagination, naps and nights awake and giving them a new life, spinning our dreams into the kind of art that will live on in the hearts and minds of everyone who comes into contact with it. And thank you most of all for letting me be included! It makes me so happy’.
She came all the way down to meet me in Euston, thank You Sia!
‘Dreaming is involuntary poetry’ JR Richter, the poet
‘Dreams are my psychological digestive system’ Stravinsky, the composer
Yes exactly.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
by W.B. Yeats
The project is magically related with the full moon. When it was born I had lived 700 full moons cycles in my life. Without knowing it I decided to create five communities of 700 dolls.
The project is also magically related to the moon as we work with sleep and dreams.
Recently scientists have done experiments to find out the relationship between the full moon and our sleep quality. A July 2013 study carried out at the University of Basel in Switzerland presented evidence that a lunar rhythm can modulate our sleep structure. They say: ‘The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not ‘see’ the moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase.’
Moon and sleep and dreams and tides and water and emotions… all connected.
We don’t need to remember our dreams, eventually it might be useful but it is not necessary. We will dream anyway. It is like gravity, we do not struggle to be here, we just are.
We sleep, we wake up, we eat, we drink, we look for our dreams. We are happy when we find them.
This is the moment to change what need to be changed, so let’s sleep.
Each piece of stuffing represents a dream and each of them has a different shape as we have different dreams. Each doll is stuffed with many dreams.
The dreams we stuff the dolls with are the dreams we have when we sleep. We need to sleep and dream. A massive amount of people suffers from sleeping problems, maybe as many as 20% of the world population.
There was a moment when I ran out of pillows. A friend suggested that I cheat the project and bought a new pillow. At that moment, to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, I told myself that the stuffing of the new pillow would represent future dreams. I liked the idea. However when I was choosing the pillow in the supermarket I just felt it wasn’t right. They were not ‘alive’ pillows yet. I gave up this idea. I continue asking friends to give me their old pillows. The future dreams are in the old pillows, dreamt by all of us. I felt relieved. I didn’t cheat the project.