update may 2005 - you can now download a booklet of dreamscapes in the books section.

themes

As the name suggest, dreamscapes is all about escapism and the lure of the dream-world; a world without limits, without worry, without corporeal concerns. A world filled with ethereal beauty. It is about the intersect between these dreams and the everyday reality we endure, the boundary that we sometimes cross in our waking life. Once we are in this world it is hard to leave, we do not want to leave. These pictures represent an attempt to preserve these dreamscapes, bring them fully into the lucid realm of the real. They provide something to look at that brings back the daydream state, the midnight state. An artefact held onto as you awoke, a piece of unreality snatched from Mr Sandman and brought screaming into this world.

For more on these themes please read the exhibition blurb.

location

Pictures from the dreamscapes series were exhibited at the Cloisters Gallery in Bury St Edmunds. This is a gallery located in the old cloisters at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Angel Hill. It is not the most well-appointed gallery in the world, but the stone walls and relaxed lighting - combined with dreamy ambient electronica (Mum, Boards of Canada, Sigur Ros, Bjork's Vespertine) from my stereo - served to draw the dreamscapes mood from the photographs, forming a substantial fug of coalescing dreams in the gallery space. Or so it seemed to me anyway.

On the other hand, this could have just been down to the fact that I had to sit in the gallery all day, everyday for a week. It is not surprising that my mind started to wonder, started to wander off around the scapes of its own accord. I was reading Murakami at the time as well, the length and increasing unreality of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles particularly apposite for my state of mind. The exhibition became a self-fulfilling prophecy for me, location and photography and music and mood and literature all combining to create the almost un-creatable, combining to create the insubstantial feel that I set out to capture. Like catching a fly with chopsticks or making a perfect gravy, the task was not impossible, but it did rely on luck as well as skill: serendipity that brings together just the right combination of disparate factors. I discovered that the Nick Cave song Gates to The Garden (from the album No More Shall We Part) was written about the area, and all I could think was what the hell was he doing here?

Pictures of the gallery space.

hanging

The pictures used for the exhibition were dreamscapes #1-12. There are more to the series, and there may well be even more in the future as I intend to continue the theme. Look out for more on this site soon.

In terms of the 12 pictures used, they loosely cover a transition from scenic, natural landscapes to more urban environs. This transition is something I have been interested in previously - a similar juxtaposition is visible in the light & shadow exhibit, while urban forms concentrates on just urban landscapes - but here these ideas take more of a back seat, only referenced in the ordering of the pictures. In fact, this secondary theme is really only present as a reflection of my general interest in all kinds of landscape and all kinds of photography, an interest that made it irrelevant to try and limit dreamscapes to a particular type of landscape.

In terms of format, the pictures are approximately A3 size (30 x 40 cm) on an MDF mount with black painted edges. This gives a very contemporary feel to the works, while the lack of a frame helps the unreality/reality divide to soften and bend. Printing and mounting was handled by Viva Imaging in Nottingham, a firm which has won several awards for the quality of their printing. Not cheap, but well worth the outlay.

results

As you may have gathered from my babbling so far, I was pretty pleased with the exhibition. Except for one, rather important, aspect: the people that came to look. As I was manning the exhibit all the time it was open (something I have not done before) it was possible to watch people coming to view the pictures. I had always thought this might be interesting, last time I visited the White Chapel gallery in London I spent some time watching the security guards watching people who were viewing the exhibit. The problem in my case was the lack of people to watch.

I admit that my advertising was a bit half-hearted, but that's because I hate advertising. As one of the few galleries in Bury I was working on the assumption that there would be lots of people who casually wandered in, perhaps on a regular basis. Especially, I should add, as I have been one of those people myself. A patron of the arts if you like. But no, the place was dead. A few people a day if I was lucky, and lots of people who decided I must know things about the cathedral as I was sat in it (ranging from the history of the place to where the coffee shop was). I didn't and, for some reason, this seemed to cause upset. People took it as some kind of personal insult. It was quite amusing at first, but after a while I did get a little fed up. The best were the couple that asked me, straight faced: where is the art exhibition? There were also frequent groups of OAPs who came to the coffee shop for lunch, but always seemed to need reminding where it was... every day. They were also quite scared of contemporary photography, one woman even started poking at things with her walking stick while maintaining an intense look of disgust on her face. After looking at every picture - just to confirm that she really did hate them all - she shot me some nasty looks, muttered something about not being able to tell if they were paintings or not, then left with all the speed she could muster. Very odd, I suspect a Daily Mail reader.

Still, there were a few people that did like the exhibition - even if they had walked in by accident - and had a bit of a chat to me about the works. To them, a hearty thank you for making some of the days a little more enjoyable.

So, lesson learned... either better advertising or a more appropriate choice of venue (and town, probably) for next time. If I can be bothered...

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