 |
View from Oneiric Pagoda 80 x 80 x 1cm, oil on board |
Behind my sleeping eyes, the sky erupted in fiery splashes and other strange phenomena. We had been told to watch out for this and not to be frightened. It was exhilarating to watch these surreal events play out across the landscape. I felt prepared, as though I had already imagined it — almost like a premonition. It seemed, too, that some part of myself was creating the phenomena.
There were several dream characters present, but I knew that only a few of them would be suitable to climb the Pagoda with me. From the elevated vantage point, we gained a clearer view of the landscape and everything unfolding before us.
Only through a subtle haunting of this 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.
