Monday, November 16, 2009


I've been keeping a diary of visual images from my dreams each night, to use as inspiration for art. The seagulls with oversized vivid orange beaks in the previous post come from this diary. On another occasion I dreamed of ill-intentioned rats with speech bubbles, each containing a single word. I couldn't remember the words in the speech bubbles but I knew they were something nasty. So I combined some rat doodles with some textured backgrounds and some found objects, to produce these unpleasant yet curiously cathartic little artworks.

My dreams aren't full of unpleasant images. In the last few days I also dreamed of jigsaw puzzles and pieces, of a cave with a fire in it which was definitely a safe and welcoming place, a wolf (who was also a woman) and her two cubs, and a room in which one wall was covered with acoustic guitars. I also dreamed of my nephew wearing a hat which looked like a rolled-up condom. Don't ask me. I don't actually believe dreams "mean" anything. They're just random images your brain throws out. My brain produces a pretty normal mixture of pleasant, unpleasant and downright inexplicable images, just like everybody else's.

3 comments:

Bill of Ballaugh said...

I like these (I think). I'm fascinated by these (I think). I'm drawn to these (I think). They're like a hole in a tooth that you can't help exploring with your tongue even though it hurts. Does all, or any, of this make sense? It's the best I can do for now.

Melanie Rimmer said...

Thanks Dad. I don't know whether people are supposed to like them or not. I have found that when I exclude conscious and analytic thought from my art-making, I am much more successful. But it leaves me with no more idea what my art "means" or what it is "supposed" to be than anyone else. I am a spectator just like you. Weird, huh?

Yellow said...

When we visited the Tate Liverpool, Lindsey created some catagories for the art she saw; stuff she liked, stuff she thought was rubbish, stuff that was dull so she just walked past it, and stuff that made her want to run away screaming!!!! I bet I know which category she'd put these into.
I think they look a bit like Lane Smith's work, from books like The Stinky Cheese Man, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. He uses collage, and found objects and funks it all up in a nightmarish kind of way. These rats also make me think of a Neil Gailan book, kind of feeling. I'd love to see more of these dream images.