The Dark Self

About

www.susanaldworth.com​

The Dark Self is a major new exhibition by Susan Aldworth exploring the experience of sleep. A highly original artist renowned for her experimental printmaking techniques and work on the human brain, Aldworth here challenges us to reflect upon our nightly transitions from consciousness to oblivion.

For centuries, sleep was thought to be an unimportant state of not-being: an absence. However, we now know that it is crucial, not only for health but for the formation of the self. Rather than being switched off in sleep, the brain is as active as at any other time – even during those periods of deep sleep unconsciousness when we do not dream, and of which we have no memory.

How can we begin to describe such a fundamental part of our lives? What does it mean for our sense of self? How, indeed, do we even fall asleep and then wake up again?

The Dark Self is a meditation on such questions. Intriguingly, the common motif linking all the works is not the brain, or even the human head, but the pillow on which it rests. The prints, sculptures and film in the exhibition transfigure the sense of absence in sleep into physical presence by drawing attention to its forms of materiality and embodiment. The central collaborative work, 1001 Nights, involving hundreds of fellow sleepers, questions whether sleeping is our most individualised and isolating experience or is, in fact, a shared one that unites us.