Dreams are our life, set free from the rationale and the constraints of the physical world. This is the setting for our subconscious at play, and we are fascinated by the dreamscape we all inhabit nightly. We seek to tease meanings out of symbols that we have ascribed specific meanings to, and yet are often none the wiser.
When I started this photographic project, my aim was to to try to capture the feeling of the uncertainty of the dream – when our expectations are confounded or confronted by the unexpected or extraordinary. The images were taken on a Scottish holiday with my partner @spottedhyenas, who made both the masks used, and indeed wore them in the majority of the photos.
With the images complete, I offered them as inspiration to the poet Mark Walton who had agreed to produce a written accompaniment to the photos. I offered no explanation – the dream narrative remains unexplained. Neither of us had worked this way before – creating individually in isolation unlike our previous collaborations. And this was the most exciting part of the collaborative process for both of us. I knew what the dreamscape meant to me, the hidden meaning and suggestions, but how would they effect someone else. What would be produced by the fevered mind of the poet? ‘The Night Before You Left’ was written in direct inspiration to the suite of pictures, and it perfectly captures the sense of dread that I hope seeps from the images, dreamlike and unending…
These images were first published in Mascular Magazine 10.
You can read the poetry and some more about the project here