Embodied Dreaming

Gaffney, Sheila ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5894-873X (2024) Embodied Dreaming. [Show/Exhibition]

Abstract

The output is an exhibition consisting of 53 pieces of Gaffney’s sculpture, drawing, lens media and moving image work from 1979-2024 alongside written text. Research process: The space of the gallery was a key knowledge instrument in the curatorial process and integral to the decisions regarding selection of artefacts and their installation. To explore this, Gaffney employed collage as a non-vocal iterative method (de Rijke, 2024). The collaging method enabled mutually agreed visual and spatial decisions for effective visitor experience, acting as vehicles to hold the conceptualisation of ideas of play in the research. These visualisations enabled an exhibition infrastructure designed to amplify the desired tacit dissemination of artefacts and mediation of exhibition content. Research insights: The exhibition highlighted the material outcomes of processes and considerations at the core of Gaffney’s feminist writing about making sculpture. The concept of time in psychoanalysis is an important part of Gaffney’s research inquiry; particularly the timelessness of the unconscious, where past, present, and future are intertwined. These concepts were made manifest in the exhibition by displaying individual artefacts dating from 1979 and the 1980s alongside works made in 2024. Several pieces that had been formerly been exhibited singly were now curated alongside works hitherto unseen. The exhibition presented a proposition for how time functions in artistic research. It challenged the display norm of time, which is typically represented by the date a work is created, as a linear indicator of the development of an artist’s research. Dissemination: First made available to the public at Blenheim Walk Galley, 4 October 2024 - 11 January 2025, accompanied by a publication. Exhibition at Blenheim Walk was included as part of Light Night 2024, 24-25 October 2024. There was a recorded public “in conversation” event at Leeds Arts University on 20 November 2024, now available on YouTube.

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