View from Oneiric Pagoda

 

View from Oneiric Pagoda
w80 x h80 x d1cm, oil on board

Behind my sleeping eyes, the sky erupted in fiery splashes and strange phenomena. We’d been told to expect this and not be afraid. It was exhilarating to watch these surreal events unfold across the landscape. I felt prepared, as though I’d already imagined it — almost like a premonition. It even seemed that some part of me was creating the phenomena.

Several dream characters were present, but only a few were suited to climb the Pagoda with me. From that elevated vantage point, we gained a clearer view of everything taking shape below.

Only through a subtle haunting of the dream did I recognise an older structure rising within it. Perhaps the Oneiric Pagoda finds its corporeal twin in the Capper Pass chimney, which dominated the landscape of my childhood home. It stands as a subconscious mirror of that industrial monolith embedded in my memories. Where the chimney once generated toxic anxiety, the Pagoda has become a source of visionary clarity.

The press called Capper Pass “Dante’s Inferno” for its toxic and radioactive emissions, including Polonium‑210. The fallout from the plant caused widespread environmental damage. Because of its immense height, the chimney carried aircraft warning lights that blinked red in the gloaming sky. As a small child, I believed it could read my mind. Its steady pulse felt like a mechanical “I see you” reaching through my bedroom window.

My early world was one of heightened alertness, a place where I learned to read signals quickly. The chimney’s red blink slipped easily into that inner landscape. It became another presence to monitor, another pulse in a world already charged with unspoken tension.

Listening closely to the quiet intelligence of my subconscious, I now seek to transmute both the physical pollutants of my youth and the emotional residue that accompanied them. The Pagoda feels like a spiritual inversion of the chimney: where the chimney radiated fear and toxicity, the Pagoda rises as a structure of clarity. Through attending to my dreams, I sense a healing taking place — a slow assimilation of those early, corrosive impressions into something integrated and whole.

This transmutation is an intuitive process. It isn’t planned or analytical; it unfolds through attentive listening to the images that surface in dreams. Painting becomes a way of allowing these inner forces to move, shift, and reorganise themselves. Through intuition, the remnants of those early experiences are gradually transformed into something coherent, meaningful, and even luminous.

Painting, photography, audiovisual composition & concept by Gaynor Perry

21st Century Music Room

21st Century Music Room
w80 x h80 x d1cm, oil on board

This expressive oil painting began with a title that arrived in a hypnapompic moment — a gift from that threshold between dreaming and waking. I held it in mind as I laid down the first “energy layer” of Neutral Tint, painted instinctively, unthinkingly, as if channeling a life force onto the board. 

Over days, I returned to the surface, scrying emerging forms and allowing the painting to reveal what it wanted to become. 

A centrifugal pull shaped the central structure — the inner room where music forms — and from the same energetic ground arose mountains, feather‑trees, steps, and, quite unexpectedly, a gentle, luminous squirrel. 

Every element surfaced organically from the initial field of marks, creating a metaphysical landscape that reflects how music moves through me: mysterious, intuitive, and alive.

Painting, audiovisual composition and vocal layering by Gaynor Perry

Listening Intently

Animated paintings, a clay self‑figure, and a haunting vocal soundscape intertwine to explore memory, place, and the slow unearthing of the self through attentive listening to landscape and origin.

Listening Intently to the Copse:

The gravitational pull of childhood haunts—

a landscape that shaped me most vividly

through my fractured moments.

Listening Intently to the Beck:

Eels wind ribbon-like from under the bridge

into the obscure waters of my memory

I trace them downstream.

Listening Intently to the Dale:

In the dimness and indifferent light

I offer myself to your purpose

and the child I was.

Listening Intently to the Self:

Wealletune, here I am.

Brushing soil from the earliest layers of myself, 

I arrive at a quiet, haunting recognition of where I began.

Concept, artwork, and audiovisual composition by Gaynor Perry, 

combining animated paintings, a bandaged clay figure, and a layered vocal soundscape.

GP

Each painting measures 30 × 30 cm and is executed in oil on board. 

The sculpture is made from air‑drying clay, wrapped carefully in gauze bandages, 

and measures 15 × 12 × 14 cm.

Listening Intently emerges from a desire to return to the landscapes that shaped me — not as literal places, but as emotional terrains held in the body. These childhood environments form the backdrop of many of my dreams, resurfacing again and again with a clarity that feels deeper than memory. I know this landscape intimately, and I believe it imprinted itself on my budding subconscious.

Each movement of the film listens to a different fragment of that inner terrain: the copse, the beck, the dale, and finally the self. These spaces surface through animated paintings and a shifting vocal soundscape, each carrying its own tone, rhythm, and memory‑weight.

I work intuitively across painting, sculpture, sound, and film, and this piece reflects that interdisciplinary approach. The final appearance of the bandaged clay figure marks a moment of arrival — a grounding, a recognition, a quiet declaration of presence.

Everyone carries a childhood landscape inside them; my hope is that the film offers you a quiet doorway into the places that linger, the ones that never quite let us go.

This film is a brief meditation on how landscape imprints itself on identity, and how attentive listening can unearth the earliest layers of the self.

Thanks for visiting!

Listening Intently To The Self (revisited): 

Disquieting is the key that rattles in the lock. 

I take the key, I turn the key, I am the key.

Walking With Joff (quadriptych)

Autumn’s prelude to winter. Psychic systems reflexively brace for hibernation. An irrational hibernation stirred by the looming weight of festive holidays. Inner resources feel thin on the ground as we tunnel toward the year’s end.

Walking With Joff is a gift from a dream — an expression for a companion state, a psychic echo quietly shaping perception from the margins. It’s a quasi-depressive state, not quite depression. Peeling back layers reveals a bedrock of chalk and unsettled sleep. Agitating this metaphysical substrate uncovers a personal archaeology.

1. Reflexion, 2. Undertow, 3. Companion, 4. Archaeology

Oil on board, each panel w80 × h80 × d1 cm

Concept, painting and audiovisual by Gaynor Perry

Walking With Joff: 1. Reflexion 

Walking With Joff: 2. Undertow

Walking With Joff: 3. Companion

Walking With Joff: Archaeology

A four-part meditation on psychic terrain and seasonal transition. Each panel excavates a layer of emotional geology: reflexive defence, submerged tension, spectral companionship, and personal archaeology.

The sound textures were created by harmonising with a playground gate I pass on my way to swim — one of the ways I stay balanced through the winter blues. 

 

These pieces emerged over the past few months as a form of self‑tending — a way of moving through winter’s emotional undertow. I work without judgement, following whatever mood, gesture, or texture wants to surface. My palette is deliberately limited to four colours — Warm Light Yellow, Warm Sepia, Neutral Tint, and Madder (Geranium) Lake — a range that gives me the tone and contrast I need while keeping the work close to the body’s own warmth and shadow. 

The natural world is my anchor: the tangled logic of hedgerows, the quiet geometry of trees, the organic patterns that soothe and steady me. As I paint, these external forms merge with my inner terrain, becoming metaphysical landscapes — places where subconscious weather, memory, and instinct coalesce into shape and colour.

Walking With Joff: 1. Reflexion, 2. Undertow, 3. Companion, 4. Archaeology

The Nelson Imperative

 

The Nelson Imperative
w80 xh80 x d1 cm, oil on board

This painting emerged somnambulantly from the fertile ground of dreams and subconscious mystery. It begins with the copse — a childhood haunt located in Welton, East Yorkshire, yet metaphysically rooted deep in my psyche.

The copse holds talismanic power within my subconscious. Whenever I find myself among its gnarly boughs, I know I am stepping into an ancient threshold where something potent will be revealed. In this incarnation, the copse appears in unfamiliar geography, and I discover it anew from the end of a lush garden. I see it bathed in ethereal light that deepens and blooms with growing intensity as the sun sets.

Rather than being planted in earth, the tall, thin trees stand in a body of clear, calm water, their expressive roots anchored by rocks. The scene feels precarious — poised on the precipice of unravelling. Illuminated by golden light, one slender trunk, in particular, resembles a leg straining to break free from the formation.

At this moment, the entire copse loosens from its fragile aquatic moorings and tumbles into the water. I stand in exultant disbelief, watching the impossible unfold as an age-old enchantment is broken. Five men appear, lying on a shore, dressed like Horatio Nelson. Once bound within the copse and now released.

A crowd gathers to witness this supernatural occurrence.

“The Copse has fallen,” I declare. “The Copse has fallen.”

It’s a momentous occasion.

The Nelson Imperative, in this dreamscape, speaks to all women as a call to reclaim the power long buried beneath enchantment, silence, or expectation. It marks the awakening of strategic brilliance, visionary leadership, and mythic selfhood — not borrowed from history, but unearthed from within.

While the Nelsonic figures conjured by my subconscious may be something of a conundrum — steeped in historical baggage and seemingly at odds with feminine modes of power — I take them as totemic sparks. Tinctures of disruption and awakening.

This painting is an invitation to recode Nelson: not as a patriarchal relic, but as a vessel for feminine mythic power.

Painting, audiovisual composition and vocal textures by Gaynor Perry

Mendlehurst

 

Mendlehurst
w80 x h80 x d1 cm, oil on board

Lean into the gulf. Open your arms and swallow-dive into the bleak nothing. 

Old recollections of deafening silence — a malleable silence. 

A radio silence so dense, take a hollow bite. Blood-thudding eardrum isolation. 

Revel in absence. Lean wide, and arrive at Mendlehurst. 

Refuel in Mendlehurst’s responsive terrain, build from here.

Painting, audiovisual composition and vocal layering by Gaynor Perry

Thanks for visiting!

Magnetic Field of Becoming

Magnetic Field of Becoming
h80 x w80 x d1cm, oil on board

This painting emerged as a way through — the product of confronting and transforming difficult inner terrain.

In this expansive, fertile territory, peregrine resonance propagates — an expression of sentience where troublesome thoughts churn in ungovernable dissonance. Only through concerted independence can I sense their subterranean rumble: a sonic architecture forming beneath awareness. And only by attuning to the ambient, life-affirming currents can I advance.

Painting, audiovisual composition and vocal textures by Gaynor Perry