Dream      10,213

Drawing      golden love with you

Dreamer     Crystal Gandrud

South Africa

As I was trying to put on mascara and remember lines I had never read nor heard, I also tried to rearrange the house

Julia and Laurent were moving out of their house in South Africa and it was chaos. They weren’t ready.

At the same time, I realized I was imminently expected to be in a play in their house. I wasn’t ready.

I didn’t know my lines or my role. It might have been a new Arthur Miller… I spent minutes attempting to figure out the stage—which seemed to be the uncovered front verandah.

It was dusk, light waning all the time, and as the audience collected I realized that:

a) they were tribal chiefs and African tribesmen slowly coming out of the bush and off the plains

and

b) there were rafters stage right where Kevin McKenna and a young friend sat, discussing me. Something about how I still looked good for my age…I could only catch moments of their conversation. (Kevin, it seemed, was also going to be in the play.)

Once I had some sense of the stage, I went inside to try on my costume: a red velvet Victorian skirt and a red t-shirt—it looked absolutely atrocious. As I was applying mascara and attempting to remember lines I had never read nor heard, I also rearranged the house; doing a dish each time I paced by the sink.

Movers shuffled in and out.

My panic rose as I strategized how to either:

a) fake the play and my lines or get out of it

and

b) figure out how Julia and Laurent were going to move out successfully.

While pacing and attempting to prepare for I knew not what, I noticed that one corner by the back door had an ancient small chair. The back door was slightly open and the walls were white. The spare, simple nature of the space suddenly made it all seem much better.

I kept thinking, You don’t even know what the play is about.

Home

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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