New Project: Sleep/Sleepless

For my final project of my foundation art year i'm am to begin with a proposal describing everything I intend to achieve during this project. This project is going to be looking at sleep and sleeplessness by trying to show both concious and nonconcious sides within one.

Proposal: 'Never Really Asleep, Never Really Awake'

The title of my project is a quote from the movie ‘Fight Club’, where the lead character describes his insomnia. I chose this as I wanted it to express both the conscious and dream states of mind. I shall be creating an installation piece based on an insomniac's bedroom. A film will depict their restlessness, hallucinations and dreams transgressing into real life. In my previous project I combined textiles with film and I now want to extend this idea, by working on an even larger scale with multiple elements. The film will challenge me the most as it will require detailed planning and editing to create the narrative. This combined with textile techniques that require a lot of experimentation will mean I have a very packed schedule.

I started my research by looking at work that refers to sleeplessness and insomnia. I found Pablo Arroyo's staged photography in 'Sleepless Men' and Claire Sloan's and Mohammed Amine Nasseri's portrayal of movement in sleep, to be a good starting point. 'Picasso' by Gjon Mili influenced me to consider brain activity during sleep. I wanted to then look at ways I could represent and it was Louisa Bufardeci's embroidered sound waves that I found very similar to brain waves.

When making patches for a quilt I looked at Vicky Lindo’s hand-embroidered pieces for its lucid stitch and appliquéd textile that show simplistic childish fantasies. I want to look at the stories of dreams that I had acquired from a survey I sent to everyone at my college. I’ll be using these results to influence my quilt and film. For film ideas I began to watch films either about insomnia or dreams. I looked at dream sequences in Salvador Dali’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Michel Gondry’s ‘Science of Sleep’ and Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’.

I’ve related my installation to Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ and ‘To Meet My Past’. I wanted to infer that there is or has been someone within this room, this idea was inspired by Floris Neususs’ ‘Be Right Back’, that I saw at the ‘Shadow Catchers’ exhibition at the V&A . Both Parul Thacker’s ‘Cosmic Dance’ and Mia Pearlman’s ‘Eye’ create a physical form that depicts the dream state. I will try to develop something similar inspired by clouds and nebula.

My initial drawings and photos will be of beds and sleeping images. I'll start to progress into images of insomnia. I'm also intending to create movement in still images to show the restlessness caused from sleep disorders. I'll be using various mark making, stitching and typography to illustrate the constant activity of an unconscious state. Slowly advancing from sleep into dream, I’ll be taking dreams and composing them in an illustrative fashion in order to describe an entire story in a single image. I’d be bringing this forward into constructing a quilt, each patch representing a different dream.

Throughout my whole project I’ll be constantly planning, filming and editing my dream sequence film. I'll be taking in the results of dream stories and looking at common dream themes and I’ll disarrange them to produce an erratic flow of scenes. To create this I’ll be storyboarding, planning and making arrangements. The mise en scene is going to be a big

part of my planning, mostly creating the perfect setting as there’s going to be a lot of change in settings and they’ll need to be able to easily portray the story within it. For this dream sequence to work I’m going to have to closely relate it towards surrealism.

Moving on from this is my final piece, the room installation itself. I’m intending to show my film on a small TV besides bed as its common for people to stay up watching TV when they can't sleep. The bedding will be plain and I'd like to attempt to make movement under the sheets. I wanted to have something hanging above from the ceiling which is where my lighting will become apparent. I want to have multiple lights hanging from above and I’d like there to be flickering light to relate to the restless activity that happens in the room.