‘Dream’ acrylic on linen 90x97cm. My subconscious has certainly become overactive during lockdown. This was an attempt to document a dream I experienced a few weeks ago. It’s an interesting excercise trying to make visual sense out of a concept that is inherently illogical and lacks structure. The process inevitably means that you loose the transient, ethereal experience but create something new in an attempt to translate an idea from subconscious, passive experience to tangible visual storytelling. The fantasy, the references and the detail reminded me of the feeling I had when I first discovered Richard Dadd’s work. I loved his obsessive detail and thought that the chaotic energy of his mark making seemed to reveal something about his state of mind. It seemed right to focus on the minutiae and try to describe something of the elaborate world my brain retreats to in sleep during lockdown. The narrative of this dream seems very far away but basically I found myself communing with a forest beast which swallowed me and encased my head so that I could perform tasks for him. The first task involved burying and reanimating a carcass and he went on to turn me in to an animal to suck the bones dry.