Sunnie
Cao
About
Dream in 2021 is a project to visually make and present my dreams. The initial inspiration came from the idea to monitor my brain waves when dreaming and knitting brain waves with wool to visualise my dreams and to try to touch them. I studied Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, a soft space with dreams as the theme is created. But after critical thinking, in fact, the audience cannot understand the meaning of the brain waves directly. So, I choose to randomly tuft wool, rather than knitting to recall my dreams.
I have made eleven dreams of different emotional states and placed them on the wall in the corner of my room. For the final installation I have sat in the middle of this space, placing some woolen threads on top of my head and each woolen thread intertwined with each other. Together, it means that this is the space of the memory of my dreams.
It’s worth thinking about the difference between dream and reality and that they may be the same. I want to give people a chance and idea to stay in their dreams. I choose to use the colour blue because I think it has a sense of virtuality. I have used only blue wool in the work. In the past, people used dreams as god-given information, hoping to get fragments of enlightenment about the future from dreams. In the field of science, dreams are subconscious imaginations, and the brain is the core processor, which evokes deep memories and abstract thoughts, and produces images that contain imagination. It is a pure expression of imagination and an extension of reality. Reality and dreams are reintegrated in a new dimension. It is impossible to restore a complete memory by recalling dreams, but the emotional state, perception, and perception left in the dream can be expressed with color and abstract randomness.
Bio
Sining Cao, born Heilongjiang (1999) is currently based in Shanghai, China and studying a Bachelor of Visual Arts, in Sculpture at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia.