Seeing In Dreaming (2021)
During lockdown, cut off from my studio and from the people I loved, something unexpected opened up between me and my dad. He had recently lost 80% of his vision following the removal of a brain tumour, and was experiencing Charles Bonnet Syndrome — the vivid, involuntary visual hallucinations that can occur when significant sight loss causes the brain to generate its own imagery. We began talking online, regularly and at length, in a way we perhaps hadn't before. He would describe to me what he was seeing — the hallucinations, the fragments, the things his brain was conjuring in the absence of reliable sight — and I would try to paint them.
Working from home on canvas, without access to my studio, I painted what he described. He would look with the small amount of vision he still had and tell me whether I was getting close to what he saw. It was a collaboration built from necessity and distance, and it became one of the most meaningful exchanges of my life. Art as a way of crossing a gap that words alone couldn't quite bridge — a way of saying: I am trying to see what you see.
In 2021 I received Arts Council funding to develop this work further, which led me to research the connections between sight loss, hallucination, dreaming and visual perception more broadly. During this research I came across the Troxler Effect — a phenomenon where images in the peripheral vision fade and disappear when the gaze is fixed on a central point. I began incorporating this directly into the paintings, structuring the composition so that certain areas dissolve when looked at steadily for long enough, borrowing from the same perceptual territory my father was navigating involuntarily.
The canvases in this series are designed to be viewed in a meditative way. Fix your gaze on each painting for about a minute without blinking and observe what happens at the edges.
This body of work became the foundation for Periphery, my solo exhibition in 2025.
untitled #1 (2020) Acrylic on canvas 60cm x 80cm.
untitled #2 (2020) Acrylic on canvas 50cm x 50cm.
Zone 2 (2021) Acrylic on canvas 50cm x 50cm.
untitled #3 (2020) Acrylic on canvas 16cm x 210cm.