world 1509

Violet Parts

In this dream, the shed has a basement.


We are upstate. It is morning and I’m just waking up. Violet is by the bed, looking worried. She asks if she can climb in with me. “Of course you can,” I say, and bundle her in. She tells me she had a bad dream (usually she won’t elaborate) but this time tells me it’s a recurring dream she has about the shed.

We have a small shed at the edge of the back yard, right before the woods start. In the summer we sweep out the mouse poo and dead moths because the kids sometimes use it as a playhouse, but mostly it’s empty. Except for the squirrels living between the ceiling and the roof.

Dream 93936 Violet Violet Yaffe world 1509

In this dream, the shed has a basement. She can see that it has a ball pit in one corner and a fountain (like in a park), so she goes down into it. But after awhile, she realizes that all the staircases that went down to the basement don’t go back up and she can’t get out. She’s very scared at this point (she’s almost crying as she tells me this).

From nowhere, there is a man, yelling a test at her. (I think this test has something to do with getting out of the basement.) He yells out a letter and she has to point to every body part that starts with that letter.

Then she gets very quiet as she tells me, Any part I miss—that I don’t point to—they take away.


Dream of the Drawing for Everything alchemies dream-like things: images and texts and films and sketches and philosophy and half-thoughts and visions and moments and fragments of all kinds. Resting and exploring here may deepen your relationship with the oneiric and, therefore, all apparent reality. Resting and exploring here may augment your psyche’s healing tendency—as Jung called it—through highlighting and delighting in humanity’s hallucinatory creations. (Without them, after all, neurologists assure us we would go starkers.) It is time there was a potentially infinite, intimate museum to what cannot be seen. Welcome to the museum.

Dream of the Drawing for Everything is some of the collaboration between artist Nuala Clarke & writer Crystal Gandrud. Our work arises out of what dances on the edges of perception and our collective attention gravitates to the dream-like nature of human experience. We have been in collaboration since 2010. Our merged practices of visual and textual art unfold on a continuum, as part of an interconnected series evolving over time. Both performed “Fair Shouldered One” (a book which is not a book) at the &Now Literary Festival in Paris, 2012 and installed “Between Spaces”, a Yeats inspired dreamscape at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 2013. Most recently participated in the Find Arts Project in Castlebar, Ireland. Our public art installation of words and images printed on linen, “Woven Found”, hung on Castle Street. The project won the best commissioning practice award from Allianz Business to Arts, 2014.

Nuala Clarke

Nuala Clarke, visual artist, lives and works between Co. Mayo and New York City. Educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to New York City in 1993. In September 2007, she received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. Clarke has been represented by Boltax Gallery, NY since 2005. Recent shows include, Amid a Space Between: Irish Artists in America at the SFMoMa Artists Gallery, San Francisco, (2012); to Tremble into Stillness, a WB Yeats related show at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; RHA invited artist; and A drawing for Everything, Ballinglen Arts Foundation (2013). BLINK, a public art installation at the Westport Arts Festival, Co. Mayo (2014). Upcoming shows (2015): Impressions of Yeats, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; Of this place, Sligo and Madrid.

nualaclarke@gmail.com

Crystal Gandrud

Crystal Gandrud, writer, lives in New York City and Normandy, France. She holds an MFA, Creative Writing and a BFA, Classical Theatre. Recent publications include “Yeatsian: Numberless Dreamers,” The Encyclopedia Project, 2014, “Here,” Lost Magazine, and “Idiom: Woodbird Flies Early,” The Encyclopedia Project. Her dissertation, “Murdoch: the Mandala Maker,” was presented at Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch Conference (2006), London. At the most recent Murdoch Conference, she performed a multi-media excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “The Forgotten Man,” inspired by Murdoch’s philosophical writings. She is under contract for a memoire entitled “Astonishment: A Litany of the Uncanny.”

gandrud@actuallyorange.com

Tell us your dreams. Dreams are accepted by the editorial staff on the basis of aesthetics. That said, there are certain topics that will not be considered. Extremely violent or pornographic dreams will not be accepted on any basis so please do not submit them.

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