Exhibition: Dream On

Dream on is an exhibition which explores dreams, the unconscious and an imaginary world between sleep and wakefulness.

New work by internationally renowned ceramist Christie Brown was created in response to the Museum collection, a co-created sculptural installation by young people from St George’s Hospital Tooting and a photography project with primary school children from Lauriston School Hackney.

Looking at our relationship to objects and the power we invest in them the exhibition plays with the notion that objects come to life when we are not looking, much like our dreams when we fall asleep.

Christie Brown’s figurative ceramic installation Ludus Est references dolls and toys in the collection and her own childhood memories. In a series of dream-like tableaux we are taken on a narrative journey in which two dolls based on the 1920’s Italian Lenci dolls explore the museum after hours.

In Baby House Dreams Brown references some of the museum’s dolls’ houses to create a photographic frieze of a row of houses. Using the psychoanalytical interpretation of the house as a symbol of the self she has populated the houses with strange occupants from her own archive of sculptures. Faces peering out of windows representing characters from her subconscious world.

Mirroring Christie Brown’s practise and processes the museum has worked with young people from St George’s Hospital Tooting over 7 weeks to co-create the installation At Play, a surreal sculptural fantasy of what some of the museums liberated inhabitants might get up to when everyone has gone home. The narratives and the characters have evolved with the project.

Photographer Madeleine Waller and artist Katherine Tulloh worked with Year 5 children from Lauriston Primary School Hackney over 6 weeks. They retold, staged, dressed and photographed scenes to create images that illustrate their own dreams in Can We Photograph Our Dreams. The children have been active agents in every stage of the creative process.