War dreams

War dreams is a conceptual contemplation on the fragments of lives and hopes in the face of war. Shoes, books and toys dot mountains of rubble and ruins in post-apocalyptic scenes following missile strikes. Such images sparked the content and appearance of the work. Reminiscent of Holocaust images of heaps of shoes signifying horror and absence, War dreams uses shoes as symbols of death and loss. Shoes suggest the physical bodies of their wearers, and also their absence, and the soil in which life and toil happened. In the work, a flutter of books makes up the top half of the sculpture to create a totem-like appearance. Books remind us that we are storied beings, and are the repositories of our heritage, culture and history. War dreams alludes to the destruction of libraries, personal book collections and with this, the loss of stories and memories. The books in the work are stalled in time, having become illegible yet expressive of the anguish of such loss. The toys that are visible in sections of the work remind us of the plight of the most vulnerable, and war’s indiscriminate massacre of the innocents.

What do we dream of during times of war? Perhaps consciousness yields to broken images, stony rubbish, lost lives, and fills our dreams thus. Perhaps there are tiny glimmers of hope, as the books that take flight at the sculpture suggest.

The sculpture is accompanied by a QR code that allows the viewer to listen to a recording of the poem To my daughter, a poem by the Ukrainian soldier and poet Pavlo Vyshibaba – from the front lines of the battlefield. In the recording, the Ukrainian is followed after each line with the English translation. The voices of Ukrainians residing in my neighbourhood were used (Dariya Sushch and Anton Dmytriiev). It is a poem about beauty and life, refusing to see only horror and darkness – instead musing about cherry trees, apricot blooms and the songs of grasshoppers in the land of war refugees.

Stairways and Ruins Image Gallery 2023

Stairways and Ruins Exhibition