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.