Jessie Gansell

Dwelling in the Midst of Dream

Midst comprises painted dreamscapes, foregrounded by inherent liminality. In these surrealistic realms, female figures dwell in spaces of dilapidation, interiority, ambiguity, and becoming. These atmospheric scenes of concurrent motion and stagnancy, intrigue and revulsion, dereliction and fecundity, unease and comfort, decay and growth—recurring states of ‘in-between’—speak to the liminality of the transitional stage of late adolescence, echoed through the intangible and symbolic world of dreams.

From my own dreams, symbols are integrated into these scenes as evocative imagery and allegories of coming-of-age; an aggregation of maggots, a feasted-upon lamb, a forest of candles. The conceptual reverberates through materiality and process—oil paint is used fluidly to stain the canvas, embedding it with a damp essence of bruising and blooming that reflects the permeable and fluxional nature of dreams. Dabbing paint away to leave residual traces, and dry-brushing to gradually layer the surface, reflects the nature of coming-of-age itself; as the works accumulate marks and encounters, so do I.

We grow, intertwined. Marks of paint are the traces of experience, the remnants of touch; just as remembered dreams are the residue of the unbound unconscious and an intangible realm beyond, which we may reach out for while waking but can only grasp futilely at fading fragments of, like paint-stains on fingertips.

The dreamscapes of Midst are not ever-static scenes or dead-ends, but rather in process and motion—fertile ground, portals of possibility, experiential sites of becoming.