York St Mary's Contemporary Art Venue Reopens 7 June With New Exhibition By Artist Susan Aldworth

< Back to News

York St Mary’s Contemporary Art Venue Reopens 7 June With New Exhibition By Artist Susan Aldworth

16 May 2017

Artist and filmmaker Susan Aldworth’s new exhibition The Dark Self was inspired by her research into sleep during a three-year residency funded by the Wellcome Trust at the University of York, working with neuroscientist Professor Miles Whittington and art historian Professor Michael White.

The Dark Self explores human identity through the unconscious, subjective experience of sleep. Where do we ‘go’ in deep sleep? We are unconscious in this state, and paralysed when dreaming. Science suggests that our brain is ‘editing’ our life when we sleep and thus sleep is an integral part of our identity.

Aldworth uses an everyday object – the pillowcase – as a visual metaphor for sleep, and as a recurring motif. Testimonies of individual sleep experience are as valid as scientific narratives – we all spend a third of our lives asleep.

The immersive installation One Thousand and One Nights consists of hundreds of pillowcases embroidered with personal sleep narratives in words and images by hundreds of people from all walks of life. It is a collaboration with diverse participants from all over the UK including prisoners, textile artists, sewing groups and students from the Royal School of Needleworkers.

The Evidence of Sleep is a series of porcelain and plaster sculptures in which the artist has captured the indentation left by the sleeper on the pillow: a manifestation of the unconscious nothingness of sleep. By turning something we know to be soft (a pillow) into a hard unyielding material, Aldworth is playing with perception and our ideas about what the world looks like in our dreams and in reality.

Dormez-Vous? is a moving image work which begins with a baby sleeping on a breathing pillow. It goes on to explore the different stages of sleep in a series of dreamlike vignettes, using animation, live action and found footage. Barney Quinton’s innovative film score was created by recording his sleeping brainwaves using a MindWave Neurosky blue tooth headset, linked to a Sound Machines Brainterface module. This process determined the eventual composition.

Finally, The Dark Self is three suites of monoprints with gold and silver pillowcases printed onto black paper that provide a “nothingness” against which Aldworth creates portals for the sleeper to fall through into sleep. She also uses the ephemeral imprint of human hair to suggest the sweep of sleep across the pillowcase.

Integral to the installation is the scale and setting of York St Mary’s, a deconsecrated medieval church that is part of York Museum’s Trust. Other artists to exhibit at York St Mary’s include Bruce Nauman and Cornelia Parker.

Funded and supported by Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust, C2D2, HYMS, York Art History Collaborations, Lumen, Lotte Inch Gallery, York Festival of Ideas, University of York, York Museums Trust, BATES of London and Viking Loom.

For more information on the exhibition, venue, and related events, please click here.