The bed is a location of comfort, rest, and dreaming as well as a place of discomfort, unrest, and nightmares. My artwork contemplates the boundary between comfort and the abject. Central to my work are themes of loss of control, collective night horror, the relationship between sleep and death, and the separation between the physical body and the soul.
I expose the unsettling similarities between sleep and death: the place where you lay to rest and the place where you are laid to rest; the bed and the death bed; the bed and the coffin. Within my work, death refers to the death of the body not to the soul. I relate the process and state of sleeping to the process and state of death, where your soul separates from the vessel. I ask the viewer to consider sleep to be an insight upon its perfect form, death.
Coming from a family of 6 children, my siblings and I collectively experienced parasomnia, consisting of nightmares, night terrors, sleep walking, and sleep paralysis. This shared familial experience built a connection as our unconscious states intersected nightly and our bodies tangled together in bed.Â
I explore night horror as it relates to location, pattern, bedding, and death. Bed sheets are a fundamental material within my work. Their softness and ephemerality mirrors the fragility of the human body, while their surfaces hold the stain and memory of use. I employ the materiality of memory by incorporating used bedding, replicating quilts and patterns, and creating botanical inks all from my childhood home. With a limited supply of bedding from that home and that time, I lay those experiences to rest by transforming their utility from something used to something viewed. Their transformation becomes a memorial to my siblings and I, to our shared night horror, and to our childhood.