creativepracticejodierundell

[creativepracticejodierundell]

Artist statement

My practice is rooted in mixed media, often exploring the interplay of texture, memory, and atmosphere. For this project, I focused on sound and painting, which evolved into a large-scale immersive installation. Building on my ongoing Dream Fossils concept, the work invites viewers into a suspended, dreamlike space where fragmented narratives and sensory layers converge. This shift in medium deepened the emotional resonance and spatial experience, allowing the concept to unfold more intimately and expansively.

[creativepracticejodierundell]

Project statement

This project explores dream imagery as a lens to examine the subconscious mind’s role in cultural appropriation. Inspired by Surrealists, I transform personal dreams into visual art, revealing how memory, imagination, and borrowed symbols intertwine while raising questions about authorship, ethics, and the shared nature of creative inspiration.

[creativepracticejodierundell]

10 images

[creativepracticejodierundell]

Personal Project Evaluation

This project has been one of the most immersive and personally meaningful experiences I’ve undertaken. It began with fragmented dreams, subconscious recordings, and half-formed images, and evolved into a physical, immersive space that brings all of those ephemeral thoughts to life. Inspired by the surreal and psychological landscapes of artists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Yayoi Kusama, I wanted to create a world that existed beyond logic but one rooted in emotion, symbolism, and memory.

Dalí’s distortion of time and space encouraged me to embrace the irrational, while Magritte’s use of symbolic familiarity helped me understand how meaning can be embedded in the simplest forms. Kusama’s immersive, obsessive environments inspired me to think about how space can become part of the artwork itself like how a viewer can be enveloped in a world, not just observe it.

Appropriation played a key role throughout the development of this work. I borrowed visual language from Neanderthal and Paleolithic cave art like handprints, animal forms, and spiral symbols, not to imitate them, but to echo their purpose. These ancient marks weren’t decorative; they were attempts to express the unseen, the remembered, the feared. In using and recontextualising this imagery, I aimed to connect personal dreaming to a much older human impulse and to leave traces of inner life on physical surfaces. These marks, while borrowed, are layered with my own narratives, allowing them to function as both homage and reinterpretation.

A pivotal aspect of the project was the act of recording myself sleep-talking. This was raw and vulnerable sometimes confronting to hear, but it revealed a voice I didn’t know I had. Some of the absurd phrases and dream imagery from those recordings were directly embedded into my work, especially my poetry and sound elements. The poem I created from this material plays on loop inside the final cave space, contributing to a sense of immersive disorientation and fragmented, like the dreams themselves.

I faced personal challenges during the process, but those emotional tensions helped deepen the work. Instead of choosing one final polished piece, I decided it was more appropriate to create a whole environment. The cave installation allowed my paintings, poetry, sound recordings, and sculptural elements to co-exist. This felt truer to the subject: dreams aren’t isolated as they bleed, layer, and loop. Creating the cave wasn’t just about displaying work; it was about inhabiting it.

Everything from the sculpted Modroc walls to the water-like lighting and suspended stalactites was rooted in memory. The animals, the spider, the langoustine they all emerged from personal dreams. The spiral symbols, handprints, and cave-like surface textures are all acts of appropriation recontextualised through a deeply individual lens. They tie the present to the past like my subconscious to ancient expression.

Ultimately, this work is about creating space for the subconscious to live outside the body. It became a way for all aspects of my practice the visual, written, sculptural; and all versions of myself from awake, dreaming, remembering to converge. Through appropriation, transformation, and immersion, I’ve built a space that honours both the personal and the universal impulse to make the unseen visible.

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Creating this cave has been one of the most instinctive and emotionally charged processes I’ve experienced during this project. It was never just about building a space; it was about stepping into the inside of my own mind and letting others in too. I shaped the walls with mesh and Modroc, carefully sculpting their surfaces to feel aged, raw, and lived-in. Every layer of paint, every smudge, was a way of collapsing time and linking ancient expression with my own subconscious.

The atmospheric lighting the blue, green, purple—mimics water, a dreamlike fluidity that flows across the surface. It gives the illusion that the cave is breathing, alive, or submerged just like memory itself. Within that, I embedded fragments from my dreams: the bear that stalked me, the langoustine, the spider, the stick figures of friends who appeared without logic. These symbols aren’t literal but they’re emotional fossils, preserved in a personal mythology.

The handprints anchor the space in something primal, echoing those left behind by our ancestors, while the spirals reference early cave symbols of life and cycles and the concepts that feel deeply linked to how dreams behave. I wanted the whole space to feel like it was waiting to be discovered, as if these stories had always been here, half-forgotten.

Seeing it complete, with stalactites hanging and my recorded poem looping through the air, I feel proud. I’ve made something that doesn’t just show my dreams as it feels like being inside one. Disjointed, symbolic, vulnerable, and ancient. This cave is a memory, a body, a subconscious landscape and in it, I’ve made space for others to find pieces of their own.

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Transforming my studio into a cave corner felt like the natural extension of everything I’ve been exploring; dreams as fossils, fragments of the subconscious, and the deep, ancient desire to leave a mark. I built the space using mesh and Modroc, shaping the walls by hand to resemble the rough, layered surfaces of real cave interiors. The darkness is intentional I want it to enclose the viewer, drawing them inward, like stepping into someone else’s subconscious.

My plan is to inscribe dream narratives onto these cave walls, using imagery and symbols that carry personal meaning but remain open enough for others to project their own interpretations. A looping recording of my poem will echo through the space, distorted and layered, creating a fractured soundscape just like the voice of a dream trying to be remembered.

On the ground, voile acts as a water surface it’s soft, reflective and unstable. It introduces a sense of movement and dream logic, where land and liquid blur. Hanging stalactites from the ceiling will complete the transformation, giving the space a weight, a presence; like something ancient and half-forgotten.

I want this installation to feel like a prehistoric discovery: quiet, haunting, and deeply human. A space that doesn’t just show my dreams, but asks viewers to feel the sensation of memory, distortion, and wonder. A cave not as shelter, but as mind, echoing with things that can’t quite be said.

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Mesh, Modroc, acrylic paint, charcoal, conte pastels

This piece became a way for me to map my dreams onto something ancient, something bigger than myself. I was drawn to the language of prehistoric cave paintings, not just for their visual simplicity, but for what they represent: the earliest attempts to record the invisible. The earliest fort of narratives and the idea that dreams are as old as these stories. By borrowing their forms, handprints, animals, human figures; I created my own version of a cave wall, one that holds fragments of my own subconscious.

The scenes are pulled from dreams I remember: being chased by horses, confronting something unknown, watching from the edge. They aren’t told in full, but etched like memories and distorted, symbolic, half-understood. The handprints act like signatures of presence, echoing both the Neanderthal impulse to leave a mark and my own need to preserve what usually fades.

This wall is part of a bigger vision: I aim to build an immersive cave experience where others can step into my dream world. I want it to feel ancient and intimate, as though the dreams were always there, waiting to be uncovered. This work reminds me that dreams aren’t just fleeting thoughts but we carry them like fossils, pressed deep into us, waiting for a surface to emerge.

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Stalactites - voile dipped and coated in melted wax

These stalactite forms emerged from my exploration of caves as subconscious spaces—places that hold echoes, memories, and slow, silent time. I used voile, a delicate and translucent fabric, chosen for its fragility and softness; qualities that reflect the fleeting, intangible nature of dreams. By dipping the fabric in wax, I transformed it, what was once light and responsive became hardened, heavy, and suspended.

The process felt alchemical. The wax freezes the movement of the fabric mid-fall, as if time itself is caught dripping. Each form hangs like a slowed breath from my poem, a frozen moment of transformation. In making them, I was thinking of time in dreams; how it folds, melts, stretches. These pieces are quiet remnants of that feeling: of being trapped in a space where time doesn’t behave.

The stalactites themselves, pulled from my own cave imagery, act as dream fossils—reminders of something once soft and shifting, now preserved in a new, permanent skin. They carry the tension between vulnerability and preservation, between what was and what remains. For me, they embody the emotional residue of dreaming, delicate thoughts, suspended and sealed in time.

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Plaster dipped Dream Journal

This piece began as a deeply personal process—a dream journal where I wrote down every dream I could recall, trying to hold onto fragments that usually slip away. Over time, the book became heavy with meaning, filled with subconscious moments I didn’t want to lose. But instead of preserving it in the traditional sense, I folded its pages—freezing it open—and dipped the entire object into liquid plaster.

Now fully hardened, the book is completely immobile. The pages are fixed in place, sealed in a permanent state of exposure, yet nothing can be read. The blue ink from my writing has seeped through the plaster, leaving behind only stains—ghosts of language. What was once intimate and fluid is now fossilised and opaque.

For me, this piece captures the paradox of memory and dreaming. It’s a preservation of something meant to disappear. The journal becomes both relic and ruin—a dream suspended in time, but emptied of content. It no longer tells the dreams, it is the dream: unreadable, unreachable, and yet still pulsing with the desire to be remembered.

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Plaster books,

These plaster books became a way for me to fossilise thought—preserving language not as something readable or permanent, but as fragile, decaying memory. One of the books is excavated with the phrase “it’s all just a dream”—a sentence that feels both dismissive and devastating. I carved it into the surface like an ancient message. It’s a line that’s often used to brush dreams aside, yet for me, it holds weight: because so much of what I make is rooted in dreams. By casting it in plaster, I’m forcing that phrase into permanence, even as it speaks to the fleeting.

The second book is more internal like a private collapse. I ripped up one of my own dream poems and embedded the fragments into the plaster before it set. As the pages hardened, the words bled into the material, becoming unreadable in parts, fossilised in others. It’s about loss, translation, and the impossibility of fully expressing the subconscious. The poem still exists but it’s buried, layered, broken.

Both books speak to the fragility of memory and the tension between trying to preserve something and watching it decay. They are not meant to be read like books but felt like artifacts. Dream remnants. Emotional sediment. A way of saying: this mattered, even if I can’t fully explain why.

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Cave painting images - research

From my cave explorations I began researching into the recent discoveries of Neanderthal cave paintings; abstract symbols and handprints dating back over 64,000 years, reveal that even early humans were driven to leave marks that went beyond survival. These weren’t literal depictions, but expressions of something internal: memory, belief, or perhaps dreams. I see these as the earliest “dream fossils”—fragments of subconscious thought preserved in stone.

This idea deeply resonates with my work. Like those early marks, my pieces aim to externalise what’s internal—through texture, broken language, and fragmented forms. Caves, for me, represent the mind: layered, echoing, and ancient. By drawing on Neanderthal cave art, I’m planning on connecting my personal dreamscapes to a much older human impulse—the need to leave traces of the unseen.

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Acrylic modelling medium, canvas

These pieces began as an exploration of texture, but became something deeper; almost instinctive. Using acrylic thickening medium, I sculpted the surface with repetitive, unconscious movements, letting the material form itself as much as I formed it. The result feels like the inside of a cave: irregular, scarred, echoing. It isn’t meant to be seen as an image but felt as a surface—something worn by time, by thoughts, by dreams.

It reflects the way my mind works when I dream, disjointed, fragmented, layered. Just like in my sleep-talking and dream poems, there’s no clear narrative here. It’s a mess, but an honest one. A tactile record of my internal landscape. In many ways, these paintings are the closest I’ve come to physically embodying the sensation of dreaming, where nothing makes full sense, but everything leaves an impression. It feels like pressing my subconscious against the wall and letting it leave a mark. A silent fossil of thought.

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Poem, simplified, fractured

Foam unspools—

stitched backwards—

(mouth—sea—)

A horse made of sand

(forgets—)

hooves unravel—

walks where water—

isn’t—

The cave—

sleepless—

turning—turning—

over—dark—

A bear—

or the idea—

hums—

(a song—no—beginning—)

Walls inhale—

cough—wings—

I slip—

between cracks—dreaming—

paper-thin—folded—caves—

A wave shatters—

twelve—versions—

(none—true—)

The horse—

sideways—

the bear—

missing—

Nothing—

remembers—

where it—

started—

This second version of the poem strips language down to its barest fragments, echoing the disjointed nature of dreams even more intentionally. In simplifying the structure and distilling imagery, I wanted each word or phrase to feel like a single shard; something found, not built. The disjointed rhythm mimics the glitchy logic of dreams: half-formed thoughts, looping symbols, moments that start mid-sentence or dissolve mid-meaning. By using repetition, and line breaks, I aimed to create the sensation of drifting in and out of consciousness—of remembering just enough to feel haunted, but never enough to fully understand. This approach also mirrors my sleep-talking: raw, fragmented utterances that feel significant but remain just out of reach. In pairing this sparse language with vivid dream imagery, the poem becomes less a narrative and more a map of emotional residue—like a fossil of the dream itself.

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Poem read aloud, recorded and layered with reverb

After writing the poem, I recorded myself reading it aloud, layering in reverb to echo not only the haunting, disoriented tone of dreaming, but also to place the voice inside the cave I dreamt of itself. The reverberation mirrors the way dreams echo through us; distorted, lingering, fading. It became more than a poem, it turned into a sonic self-portrait of being submerged in the subconscious, where memory, fear, and absurdity all reverberate like footsteps in the dark.

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Poetry

This poem was shaped by the atmosphere of my sleep-talking recordings; those disjointed, often vulnerable moments where the subconscious spills into sound. While the horse and bear weren’t spoken aloud, they’re drawn from dreams I remember vividly: surreal, symbolic figures that haunted me in sleep. The recordings influenced the tone and structure, a rhythm of fragmentation, confusion, and strange intimacy. I used the emotional texture of that vocal subconscious to build a dreamscape where remembered imagery and recorded nonsense blur into a poetic expression of the subconscious mind unraveling.

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Sound piece - collated sleep talking

Over two weeks, I recorded myself sleep-talking—an act that felt oddly intimate, like catching my subconscious mid-whisper. I didn’t expect what I heard. There were strange confessions, absurd stories, tiny emotional outbursts: arguments with no context, langoustines kept as pets, fleeting fears, quiet jokes. Some parts made me laugh. Others made me uncomfortable. But all of it felt raw—like pieces of myself breaking through the surface without permission.

Listening back, it sounded like a distorted poem. One written in a language my waking self doesn’t fully understand. Each fragment was disconnected from the last, yet together they formed a strange kind of rhythm—echoes of thoughts trying to be born but only half-emerging. It’s both comical and sad. To hear yourself talk nonsense with such conviction feels vulnerable. It’s like being caught mid-thought, mid-dream, exposed without control over the narrative.

In many ways, this piece feels like the audio version of my mosaic—the vocal equivalent of placing broken tiles to build a shape that’s never quite whole. The sounds are sharp, slurred, soft, or jarring. Like emotional fossils unearthed accidentally. Each moment is a shard of something once fluid—now frozen in sound.

What fascinates me is how the subconscious leaks out, not just as image or dream, but as voice—into the room, into the real. It’s a kind of erosion of the boundary between internal and external. The body becomes a vessel for dream-fragments to escape. These recordings are not just documentation; they’re performance, confession, absurd theatre.

This piece, like the mosaic, is about the impossibility of fully reconstructing a dream. And maybe that’s the beauty of it, these fractured expressions, these sound fossils, hold more truth than clarity ever could. They are the poetry of not knowing. And I think I’m learning to be okay with that.