world 1368 (bramblethickets)

Dream of the Drawing for Everything

Nuala, can you say more about that?


Version A:

Nuala Clarke’s dream came up in a conversation with Sokuzan. We were discussing astrology as dada or confetti or jazz.

Nuala: I had a lovely dream recently where there was a drawing for everything.*

I was making a drawing for everything. They were long drawings like I’m making now. Like I was already doing. There was one for failed marriages and one for passport control and the one I was drawing as I was dreaming was the one for relaxing. It was so pleasurable. So pleasurable. I could barely believe how pleasurable it was.

Sokuzan: Nuala, can you say more about that?

Nuala: Well, I really do feel like there is a drawing for everything. It feels like I’m trying to get everything into the paintings right now anyway. When you look at them they could be animal and…mineral, space and matter. At the same time I’m doing Emptiness so (laughs)…You can’t tell what something is but it reminds you of a lot of elements all at the same time. Everything except society. I’m talking about everything in the natural world. I’m not talking about society and culture—maybe at some point in my life I’ll be ready to deal with society but right now I’m not.

Crystal: Or perhaps those are the foundations society is based upon? They are society and culture; arise out of, not exclusive; it’s just that the natural world is not limited to what we make of it.

Nuala: They are the things I deem important right now. The essentials; being; the essential world, so the other stuff is fluff and I don’t need to deal with it right.

(pause)

Yet there is a drawing for passport control, you know, which felt very interesting in the dream. Passport control is what I pass through in order to get back into Ireland.

Crystal: Very human society: rules, lines. And marriages, failed [is there any other kind?] or otherwise.

world 1433 (failed marriages)

world 1433 (failed marriages)

*Nuala wrote:

in my notebook I took notes from Yeats’ A Vision A:
‘left hand path
antithetical mask
15th night of the moon
moon and sun equivalent heights
what is important: the vehicle or the consciousness?
secular and sacred at the same time
the subway track is the river down which I travel to work.’
There is so much in the notebook; many things I don’t understand or know where they came from.

Version B:

Nuala wrote:

While dreaming, in sections, I was tracing a line. I saw that I could put a relaxed line down and down. There were words and knowing. Significance. I knew that I would forget but part of me knew, too, that it has to be done and what it is that needs to be done.

One two three four five…

Drawings for everything: passport control, failed marriages, fishermen, salt, bramble thickets, moon landings and relaxing, especially relaxing.’

Dream0-DDFE(NC)relaxingCROPPED

world 1063 (relaxing)

 

Version C:

Another time I asked Nuala to again describe the dream and she said, “It was a drawing down my body, Buddha on the torso, gourd-like (I woke up and my hand was moving).”

I asked her which hand and she wondered that it was her right hand since she is left-handed.

drawing for Passport Control

world 1425 (passport control)

[Since then, I have asked her what is accurate of what I have written and she says she does not know. “Perhaps much of it is from other dreams,” she says.]

world 1380 (missing fishermen)

 


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.

All dreams must have three components:

1) a title

2) a number of no more than 20 characters (subject to a request to reconsider if that number is already used)

3) your name as you wish it to appear

Dreams may be any length.

Please submit dreams in an attached word document only. If you, as the dreamer, are also a visual artist, you are invited to send one companion image in the form of an attached jpeg of a file size of no larger than 250k (no compressed files). If you are not a visual artist but feel a drawing you have done of the dream deepens the experience of it, please follow the guidelines for submission of an image above. In both cases, please specify if you are willing to publish the text without the image.

info@actuallyorange.com