Coronavirus dreams: Gayle Chong Kwan is turning our lockdown anxiety into art

During lockdown, our subconscious minds have been trying to make sense of isolation in our dreams. Gayle Chong Kwan is deciphering them - by turning them into art

“Cranes morphed into a sleeping giant”; “Desperately trying to go to my grandma’s funeral”; “Finding small creatures that needed rescuing”; “Escaping a closed-down museum”. In a quiet studio in Leytonstone, dreams are streaming in.

Gayle Chong Kwan is one of six artists commissioned by the London borough of Waltham Forest for its “virtual culture” programme this summer. Chong Kwan specialises in how unremarkable everyday objects connect us to the wider world – her previous work has been shown at the Barbican, Southbank Centre and Tate Modern.

In Wastescape (2012), she built an ornate white grotto under the Southbank Centre, made out of old milk bottles. For Atlantis (2014), she built a model tourist resort out of plastic packaging, filled with extravagant architecture based on La Grande Motte, near Toulouse, and hotels in Dubai. Quarantine Archipelago, shown last year, featured collages of imaginary quarantine islands, inspired by early medical photography of a plague outbreak in Hong Kong.

Gayle Chong Kwan is one of six artists commissioned by the London borough of Waltham Forest for its ‘virtual culture’ programme this summer (Photo: Kwang Sheung Chi)

For her new project, “Dream Tapestry”, Chong Kwan is gathering dreams from locals – and anyone who wants to take part – to embroider into the inside seams of pre-loved clothes. If lockdown lifts further, she plans to work with local sewing groups to produce it.

A tapestry of isolation

“That’s partly reflecting my own situation of being on my own with no adult company for two and a half months with my boys [she has been locked down with her sons], that lack of touch,” she explains. “It felt important for it to be in clothes.” Embroidery is hidden in the clothes, along seams or inside pockets: “It’s about the idea of almost holding somebody else’s precious, intimate dream close to your body, whether you know it or not,” she says.

Gayle Chong Kwan Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes Provided by writer Ellie Broughton
Caption: Gayle Chong Kwan
Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes

After exhibiting the collection online (and in Walthamstow’s William Morris Gallery, if distancing permits), every item will be donated to local charity shops.

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Giving up the work means she will have no control over what happens to the pieces, she adds. “I’ve always loved the idea of things not being necessarily in the conventional ‘art world’ circuits. Instead of encountering them in galleries, they go into charity shops and are then almost lost, and maybe found again at some point that you don’t know.

Inspiration in dreams

Chong Kwan had planned an environmental art show in Venice (awarded by the Sustainable Art Prize) and a photography residency project at the V&A, capturing how its collection is conserved and moved. Both of those commissions are on hold or postponed. The art world has been battered by Covid-19: Visual Arts South West reports that 44 per cent of visual artists have permanently lost work; galleries have begun to reopen but even giants such as Tate Modern expect less than a third of last year’s footfall. Still, Chong Kwan seems unfazed. “Artists are used to working with uncertainty and a level of having to go with the flow,” she reflects. “Every year is completely different.”

Gayle Chong Kwan Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes Provided by writer Ellie Broughton
Caption: Gayle Chong Kwan
Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes

She is not the first to find inspiration in dreams. From the heavenly spool of William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder to the squatting goblin of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, the art world has returned to the subconscious again and again. Paranoid and claustrophobic dreams that so many experienced in lockdown echo some of the most iconic dreams on canvas or film: the attackers in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon; a nightmare at the start of David Lynch’s Lost Highway; the crouching lions of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream; and the pouncing tigers of Salvador Dalì’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate

Others are delving deeper right now, too. At University College London’s psychoanalysis unit, students have been collecting dreams. Jake Roberts, one of the researchers, says that the project was inspired by students discussing their dreams over Zoom. “We had a meeting every week where we went over reading for the course. But then we ended up talking about our dreams,” he says. “From there, we looked to see if everyone else was having the same thing.”

Jungian psychoanalyst Ruth Williams sheds some light on three submissions to ‘Dream Tapestry’:

“I was alone at a lake beach and I went swimming. It was peaceful, the water was me.”

Being alone at the beach may refer to the isolation many are experiencing in lockdown, although this dreamer is in an appealing and peaceful location so isolation may be welcome. Water can often be seen to represent the unconscious. When the dreamer says “the water was me”, fluctuations of the water, fluidity and immersion in swimming all speak of the dreamer being steeped in an atmosphere or condition that both is and is not “her”.

“We met a cabinet minister in the street and invited him to dinner, even though we deeply hate him.”

This dream might be seen in terms of how politically galvanised many people have become at this time. The personal is very much political and we are witness each day to the shenanigans of our ruling classes, which evoke deep hatred and distrust in many. And yet we are forced to “have them to dinner”, so to speak, at their daily press conferences. If I were a politician, I might be chastened to see how reviled politicians have become at this time.

“Our toilet roll was made of £20 notes.”

This hardly requires an expert interpretation: the beginning of the pandemic was marked by panic manifesting in bulk-buying toilet paper. Fear or anxiety is the underlying feeling here.

The project, “Lockdown Dreams”, now has more than 700 submissions, although the torrent they experienced in April has now slowed to a trickle. Anxiety dominates around 80 per cent of them. “It’s not so much nightmares,” Roberts reports, “but more a strong sense of anxiety – for example, feeling trapped in houses. The most featured location is the house. People feel like they’re barricading themselves in against an unknown  danger.”

People who have been reporting dreams to the project say it has been therapeutic and, Roberts adds, projects such as “Dream Tapestry” have a similar function for expressing dreams through artwork. “Being able to talk about it, being able to relate to it, is cathartic, because you’re looking at something emotive and making sense of it, which people don’t usually find the time to do,” he says.

A shared experience

Long before the pandemic, Martha Crawford, a psychotherapist in New Mexico, was collecting dreams. After a particularly weird one of her own about Donald Trump, she began asking other people about their Trump dreams. Her work, 45 Dreams, is an experimental collection and exhibition of accounts of these dreams, published chapter by chapter. Crawford was shocked by how often she saw the same dream. “There were literally people who have recorded them verbatim. Like, I would throw out seven dreams because they would all be exactly word-for-word the same, and I could just use one as an example,” she recalls.

Collecting the dreams was a consolation: “When you look at 3,000 dreams you see quickly that there are huge clusters of themes. When you start to see the dreams have a collective function, it’s comforting.”

Talking about dreams can be thought of as tedious, she acknowledges – or worse, meaningless – but she enjoys it. When people remember dreams, she recommends they acknowledge them in some way: “Old Jungians used to say when patients came to the door: ‘What did you do about your dream this week?’ If you hadn’t made any gesture – like, made a painting or drawing or doodle – they wouldn’t let you in.”

Gayle Chong Kwan Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes Provided by writer Ellie Broughton
Caption: Gayle Chong Kwan
Peoples dreams embroidered into the seams of clothes

For therapists, recording, reporting or making artwork about dreams becomes a way of signalling openness to the unconscious. In Jung’s writing, a work of art and a dream are alike – “For all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal.”

Most of us are familiar with the feeling that something has been trying to get our attention overnight. But for Chong Kwan, “Dream Tapestry” is not about looking for answers: “I’m not doing this as a sort of analytical project. It’s more a way that intimate or personal individual responses can become part of a communal shared experience.”

Dream Tapestry remains open for submissions. It exhibits online at wfculture19.co.uk in September.

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