Dream Plan — Liz Kilham

Dream Plans

About a year ago, I began taking a medication which brought on dreams that were vivid; stark and bright, and intensely real. After years of not being able to dream, I had been struck by a psychological landscape, that was often hard to shake well into my day. Night sweats, teeth grinding, parched. Like a dream that went on forever. Last night say, I dreamt of two oceans. One was from long ago, on high cliffs, and the other was busy and polluted. In both oceans I lay motionless. Waking from the ocean I felt muddy, all morning pulling myself from the salted water. Something about the constructed space sticks with me, coating the walls of my actual surroundings.

As a way to trace the boundaries of the ‘spaces’ I dream in, I have began to draw them, in plan and in section, in the hope to seperate them from reality, as sometimes it can become difficult. This process has reminded me of how others trace the spaces that they dream in, or store in their memories.

Mike Kelley, his work spanning across the 80’s and 90’s, until his death in 2012, addresses the composition of repressed architectural memory; his largest work ‘Education Complex’, tracing the boundaries of schools that he attended as a child. His work accesses a temporal space and then uses architectural tropes and forms as a means to track the failures of his own memory. The production of these memories produces an architecture of isolation; Kelly’s model of his primary school; a sprawl of white corridors that lead nowhere. Rem Koolhaus speaks of “one room leading to another and then another, spilling into infinity…,” to me, this speaks to how Kelley’s Educational Complex reads.

In a more physical sense, but producing a similar outcome, Anne Holtrop’s series of three studies, ‘The House of Glass Was Suddenly All Solid Walls,’ explores what a ‘wall’ is in relation to a dwelling. She notes a ‘tension between settled and unsettling, between form and formless,’ within the research. What I find interesting in this set of architectural study models are its origins. Holtrop has said that the roots of the research come out of a dream she had, wherein an isolated architectural feature was replaced with something else; 'I dreamt the building was sealed, there were no doors, no windows, no way in or out, nothing to knock, nothing to ring, nothing to bang against,” she says. “The house of glass was suddenly all solid walls.’

From the origins of an unconscious narrative, comes a study of the things that surround us everyday, the two things distinctly seperate, but none the less related.

The House of Glass Was Suddenly All Solid Walls, Anne Holtrop, 2006