world 1601

David Space Bowie Space

I felt very close to him as we contemplated the folly.


January 11th, 2016

~David Bowie was very old and needed care. He wore a pink nightgown with a cartoon cat print. It was time for his shower so shuffled for the door. I said I’d be near the bathroom in case he called for help.

~Four or five journalists, men with black beards, visited to interview David Bowie but he had to go up to bed. He slowly mounted the stairs, which were on the outside of the house. The journalists were only interested in me if I knew anything about him but I was determined to betray nothing. I stood by the foot of the stairs with my arms defiantly crossed, refusing to answer their questions about his imminent death.

~David Bowie and I looked out my grandmother’s back window. Many people paraded by on the expanse of very manicured lawn. It was some kind of festival or church fête. A few of the women wore fancy dress with ornate white headdresses. I felt very close to him as we contemplated the folly. Then he was on a plastic pedestal and I was naked. He bent over and touched my breasts. That was when I realized I was younger than I am now. I said, You may be old but you haven’t forgotten how to feel someone up. He laughed.

~David Bowie was in the Swiss Alps high above a sky chalet. He was younger, but not very young, and dressed like a rake, in black. He needed to get to the chalet very quickly so he took off his black skis. They immediately melded and grew to a sleigh bed length and width. He lightly propped the sleigh bed on its end and tipped it into the snow. Then he slalomed rapidly down the mountain and into the front door. It reminded me of a scene from Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, Or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck.

~David Bowie had done the laundry and I was not pleased with the results so I asked him to do something differently with the towels next time.

I woke up in tears because David Bowie would never do laundry again.

 

These dreams, although individually brief, took all night. I was aware while dreaming that I was asleep and consciously dreaming of David Bowie as a way of saying goodbye. The hum of that awareness gave the dreams an overwhelming texture of mourning and loss. 

 

See Dream 679, in which I am wearing pajamas and lounging around with David Bowie, who sporting a bathrobe. Also, the cat’s pajamas: a phrase originating from the 1920s, referring to the newest thing. Possibly related to the idea that pajamas—a relatively new design in sleepwear—were riské.


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

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