Hannah Digs Deep
Hannah Digs Deep
An Essay accopanying an exhibition by Hannah Guy at Heart Community Centre, Headingley, Leeds.
Nightmares and Daymoths: A Photographic Investigation of The Dreamscape by Hannah Guy. An Exhibition at Heart Community Centre, Headingley.
https://www.instagram.com/hannahguyartwork/?hl=en
“If we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it.” C.G.Jung Collected Works V.16.para. 86
There is a neglect of imagination in our Western culture and an over identification with logical conscious thought; in our culture the arts have the status of entertainment rather than a faculty of thought crucial to human well-being and effectiveness in the world.[i] (McGilchrist 2009&2021). And, dreams are beyond the pale of consensus reality.
Dreams are a primary form of the imagination. They are a thought process in symbolic form, creating images and stories, generating meaning, capable of holding complexity, and, happen spontaneously. Because it is not part of our way of life to share them, we are not aware that they are expressions of what Jung called the collective unconscious, like mushrooms in relation to their mycorrhizal network. They are personal and collective, we don’t create the spaces to realise our dreams relate, talk to each other. [ii]
While our typical idea of mind and thought is logical and conscious and allied to the idea of science as objective, actual sciences, neurology, biology, quantum physics[iii] now advance conceptions of the mind and thinking processes as participatory. In Dan Siegal’s multi-disciplinary research towards a definition of ‘mind’ it is a “relational and embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”[my italics] ‘Relational’ meaning it happens between us, and ‘embodied’, thinking is now understood as involving the whole body not just the brain; two huge changes in our typical idea of the human. “You can’t look at mind as individual energy, or as property of the individual.” (Siegal,D. 2012)
Contemporary science conceives ‘mind’ as our participation in energy flows processed by our entire bodies as well as our brains. This now meets indigenous wisdom about dreaming. “The consensus reality of aboriginal people is based on dreaming and consciousness, in contrast to time and space. The first thing people do upon awakening in some Australian groups is to sing a song based on their dreams so that the animals and birds hear their dreams and assist the dreamer in daily hunting and gathering. In this world view, each substance (animal. plant, mineral) has its own dreaming.” (Mindell, A p.225)
While dreams are spontaneous[iv] products of the individual and collective psyche, human attention produces the arts, farming the mycorrhizal depths. In art, at its best, attention is “primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exists in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness.” (Tolle.E 2003 p.16)
Hannah Guy digs deep in bringing together dreams and art in this exhibition, it is her song from an indigenous wisdom rooted in the experiences and dreams of friends and family.
She realised for some of her friends, emptiness and lost space in the pandemic had no identity, they remembered only good experiences. She noticed too the absence of her dreams at that time, both community and meaning making disrupted. As a result of the perceived suspension of ordinary time during the pandemic, clear understandings of the future were postponed, the past hovered like a ghost over the present.[1] (Siobhan Kattago)
In my view noticing the presence of emptiness rather than being swallowed by it, takes particular strength, a kind of integrity.
The pandemic confronted us with our enfeebled imagination in our lack of anticipation and incompetent responsiveness. We were frightened, I think, because our capacity for thought is impaired without consciousness or understanding of why it is impaired.
Hannah Guy relates a dream of a plastic bag in an attic moving, not knowing what it is, wondering whether to figure it out or leave it alone, learning to sit with forms that are left behind.
She describes the process of learning to listen. Her father, interested in the psychology of the body’s immune system (pyschoneuroimmunology), taught her to listen to aches and pains to see what they were saying. Jung taught that suffering was saying something that could not be expressed in any other way. Suffering coupled with curiosity is potent and pregnant.
The setting of the artwork roots from a shared love of nearby railway viaducts with her grandfather. Where, vaults, like dreams but of brick, support lines, flows of communication and travel.
Hannah utilises the performance of long exposure light within her photographs to reveal what is left behind in memory and dreams. Hannah creates a spotlight to inquire towards objects of dreamt significance, facilitating their dreams forms to exist in the now.
Dreams and art require capacities for curiosity and uncertainty, for steady attention: and to bear the reality that good understandings emerge, and from relational processes. Hannah Guy’s work and practice demonstrates this, she knows how to create a space in which things can happen, how to hold the between, or in her phrase, ‘honour listening’.
James Barrett
Jungian Psychotherapist
Siegal, Dan. 2012 The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who we Are. Guilford
Tolle, Eckhart. 2003 Stillness Speaks Yogi Impressions
[1] https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211054015 Siobhan Kattago Ghostly pasts and postponed futures: The disorder of time during the corona pandemic
Siobhan Kattago
Memory Studies 2021 14:6, 1401-1413 p. 1402
[i] The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist
[ii] https://leeds-psychotherapy.co.uk/dreams-enrich-enable-and-energise-communal-undertakings/
[iii] Mindell, A.2012 Quantum Mind. Deep Democracy Exchange.
[iv] Autochthonous is an even better word for dreams meaning “one sprung from the soil he inhabits” (plural autochthones), from Latinized form of Greek autokhthon “aborigines, natives, primitive inhabitants,” literally “sprung from the land itself,”