Space-honey

About

SPACE-HONEY reveals how dreams can manifest in both familiar and uncanny forms. This multi-sensory display of emerging artists explores the Freudian dreamscapes of the subconscious. Here, memory and desire collide to override the real; altering the nooks and crevices of Peckham’s Safehouse 1 from dilapidated ‘home’ to surrealist wonderland.

Gaston Bachelard’s metaphor of honey in a hive depicts the relationship between waking and dreaming. Taking root from Bachelard’s seminal work ‘The Poetics of Space’ (1958), physical space becomes a honey-like substance under the scope of the imagination; oozing and leaking out of its container. Much like artist Ellen Antico’s sumptuously painted female forms that digress into fantasy or the uncanny sculptures of Ellie Hoskyns-Abrahall. The dreamer of honey sees through poetic eyes, giving everyday objects ‘infinite expansion’. 

This power to go ‘beyond reality’ was initially showcased in the 1920’s Surrealist movement with an array of disembodied figures and unnerving landscapes; seen in Olga Paczka’s chilling installation of hanging limbs or Yasmine Dicken’s latex skin furniture. Merging the inner psyche and the outer world, Sangwa Yim's video work uses garmentry of the human body to explore both physical and psychological ‘frames’, from spatial trappings to online social compliance. 

By starting from the first dwelling point: the home -  dreams can be mapped across architectural boundaries; from beyond the four walls to the very skin we live in. Artist Simona Sharafudinov explores this by focusing on the tensions between expanding digital space and disappearing physical space of the ‘home’, whilst Giovanni Vetere uses his own body in a durational piece creating an embodied habitat for the imagination. Through approaching Surrealist views a century later, SPACE-HONEY exposes the psychological tensions of present-day; combining art, poetry and performance to depict how our innermost desires and dreams can transform our surroundings.