Tamashi Fernando

Subconscious Desires is a collection of dreamscape oil paintings that explores the relationship between memory, dreams and my desire to escape. My work stems from a dissatisfaction with my surroundings and a longing for environments beyond my immediate reality. I draw from lived experiences, memories, dreams, and imagination to reconstruct landscapes that reflect the fragments of nature that have remained in my subconscious. There is recurring imagery of well-like structures, lily pads, lilies, and tree roots that appears in different variations throughout the series. These elements reflect the fragmented and repetitive nature of dreams, where familiar images resurface, shift, and transform into unfamiliar environments that exist between reality and imagination.

Subconscious Desires draws on Surrealist approaches to image-making, particularly the transformation of familiar objects and environments into unexpected and dreamlike configurations. My work also explores liminality, focusing on the experience of existing between contrasting states: waking and dreaming, memory and imagination, and familiarity and unfamiliarity. The recurring natural forms function as fragments of remembered environments and suggest how memory can distort and reconstruct lived experiences. The paintings offer a temporary escape into the space between the conscious and the subconscious mind.