In Sleep.....We Dream (2002)
Ruth West
I have been thinking a lot about sleep in the last year, in particular dreams. I find my dream life is an absorbing place where relationships of objects and colors, combine and exist in a way that is nonverbal and perfect in every way. Tunnels appear, doors open, rooms grow and it all flows together in a natural progression from night to morning. Because of this, I decided to create an installation to map a dream; to create an artwork that would mimic a Chinese landscape scroll, that could be unrolled and be looked at in a piece or dropped into to view at any point.

The Scroll
I found in a magazine a wonderful description of different ways to create gardens using 7 archetypal Chinese structures that mimic birth to death. This I used as the structure for the piece, a way to look at the whole, that would address these archetypes, these spaces that I had been seeing in my sleep and that would take the piece from beginning to end. The scroll is 30' by 2'

The Sleepers
The sleepers on the wall frames the scroll, defining the physical environment of sleep, and the parameters of the scroll. They are seen as if the viewer is floating above them looking down at these manifestations of sleep. There are seven of them, describing the movement of the sleeper through the dream state.
View Installation
Artist Statement