In starting to explore this threshold between sleep/ wake and what it looks like for me I noticed through my rough drawings (some blind and some with our eyes open), that my state between sleep/ wake involves movement, lack of control and a sense of an impending reset.
As I started to sketch a few ideas for my A2 concept drawing I came to realise that as I sleep I create layers of dream worlds and as I begin to wake my mind starts to get drawn up though all these layers of my subconscious inducing confusion and the feeling of weightlessness as all these worlds get blown apart until I wake in reality.
I chose Cynical/ Non Cynical, Temporary/ Permanent and Dream/ Certainty as my three threshold relationships that relate to Sleep/ Wake as these thresholds are at play in my Sleep/ Wake threshold.
Two films come to mind when thinking about my threshold of sleep/ wake. The first one being ‘Inception’ and the second being ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Specifically the scene in Inception of them breaking out of the multiple dreams and everything is chaos and makes no sense and the scene of Alice falling down the Rabbit hole in Alice in wonderland.
To get some inspiration for my A2 concept drawing I researched a few artists and designers and drew inspiration from Tom Dixons Curve Pendants from his 2016 collection, Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate 2006, Rachel Whiteread Untitled (Stairs) 2001 and Motoi Yamamotos salt installations creating labyrinths. I liked the projection Dixons Curve pendant created especially on the narrow corrugated surface. It creates distortion in the space as well as a temporary moment due to the effect of the projection only existing when the lights are turned on. I love the way Kapoor uses mirrored surfaces for some of his work. It provides a new perspective on the world and due to the Cloud Gates curved form, that perspective changes and warps depending on where you’re standing. Whitereads stairs conveys that relationship of cynical/ non-cynical quite well I as the two sets of are for each side and will lead you in different directions depending on which path you take but also challenges you to make sense of an illogical scenario. In thinking of the mind and our subconscious i think the idea of a labyrinth (referring to Yamamotos salt installations) is quite fitting. Our mind is a maze and we often get lost wandering through the multiple avenues of our subconscious making it difficult to find our way back to reality.
In my first iteration of my A2 concept drawing I drew on the labyrinth shape of twists and turns in the form of a brain. I drew from both Kapoor and Dixons work to create a metallic projection of the brain to show that the mind was adrift and creating a new layer to explore in sleep. I used butter paper to create a shear over lap on the brain to create another layer to explore and used bright coloured pastels and fluid lines to contrast the grey lines of the brain showing a cynical mind that lives in reality and a non-cynical subconscious creating chaos. By only attaching the metallic brain and the colour layer by a few points it suggests that both can be removed very easily showing that relationship of temporary dreams and ideas vs permanent reality. The overlapping of layers on the brain are also playing with the idea of what do our minds classify as dream/ certainty. We aren’t certain of which level is the active brain as even the brain on the paper can be erased as its only drawn in pencil (temporary/ permanent).
Spatial Fabrication 