“Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you”

– Marsha Norman

I have been to some amazing galleries: smalls ones in quaint New England towns and large scale exhibitions in big cities, however my favorite galleries are the ones I visit in my sleep. I never know beforehand what will be on display. I do know upon waking who the artist and curator are.

Laura Di Piazza, Moving Sandwich, 2011, pencil on paper, 20” x 24”

I first saw “Moving Sandwich” in a dream gallery I visited while sleeping. I was walking slowly through this space and stopped before this drawing and thought “I really like this, it makes sense”. When I awoke I wrote down a description of the drawing. A couple of months later, I created this drawing which is very similar to the original one I saw in my dream. By including dream imagery in my art practice, I enjoy incorporating parts of life that are very much present however difficult to remember and acknowledge. I also feel that this practice of including my dream world into my waking (we certainly include our waking life into our dream world), helps me acknowledge where I go, where we all go, for part of our day. As abstract and foreign as dreams may be, they are an activity we all experience. This thread of our greater connection, through dream experiences, I believe deserves our attention.

Laura Di Piazza, Bunny Says, 2011, spray paint, paper and ink on plastic,

23.5” x 27”

In contrast, my work “Bunny Says” was not seen in a dream, that I am aware of: However, because I feel it has many dream-like qualities to it, it belongs in the collection of my dream-inspired works. For example, the canvas itself is actually a garbage bag, which has symbolic value: I wonder, are our dreams part of a mental or mnemonic recycling system, as some sleep scientists have suggested? Do we need to clear out or sort out old information to make room for new information? These questions are the backdrop of the work. The center of this piece is newspaper print that has been spray-painted on. I sometimes find recalling dreams is similar to this spray-painted newsprint, where the information is all there however I cannot access it – or in this case, read it.

Laura Di Piazza, Past Mt. Rim, 2010, ink, tissue paper and newspaper on coverstock board, 18” x 24”

The artwork pictured left, “Past Mt. Rim”, encompasses all of my artistic practices; calligraphy, poetry, dream exploration and visual art making.

I found that my dream recall improved while taking a class at AVA gallery called Art and the Unconscious. What resulted was a collection of fragments of a dream that inspired “Past Mt. Rim”.  The title alone represents the enormous mountainous surface, one side of which, we live upon during one part of our day, the other side of which we stand upon during the night. It is impossible to be on both sides at the same time. However I have found with lucid dreaming that I can reside at the summit, which joins the two briefly. In the deep states of art-making, where awareness of time is absent, I also find that I enter a similar state that welcomes me to stand in this kind of dual space.

My dream treasures gathered during this class also included the following artwork “Scanning Inner Child” (below) which I saw in a dream and brought to (daytime) life later that spring. I find that the overall dream impression is usually determined by the predominate feeling(s) the dream encompass rather than (only) by the actions that were played out therein. The dream that inspired “Scanning Inner Child” contained strong emotions to hunt and gather my abandoned wounds, the unhealed cuts and bruises of my psyche. To go back to my internal forest, however deep the dark felt or primal the noises sounded, to retrieve, acknowledge, mend and sow, as I would flower seeds, my discarded pain.

Laura Di Piazza, Scanning Inner Child, 2010, paper and ink on doll, approx. 5 lbs – 7 oz.