Book 5  Night Crossing Penn. C.  (2008) (Fig. 3). Night Crossing.  Unique altered book. Mixed Media, including painting, drawing, collage, text.  19cm x 33cm x 23cm. Book 5. Collection: Cheryl Penn.

Night Crossing was appropriated  because of its title.  I have taken ‘night crossing’ to mean that moment of transition when the night crosser,   a symbolic person,  transforms and  recontextualises  the fragments and images of one’s day into the dream image sequences of  the night. Again, most of the text is obliterated with  the surreal elements remaining; those textual fragments which allude to dreams.  For example;  …there were shadows at the front door, beyond the glass…;

…the world could blink out in a second; … a cluster of hedgehogs erupted all around…  These textual fragments, taken out of context become the equivalent of  a visual fragment  in the altered book.   Inserted into the book are personal dreams, pinned onto the pages.  The choice of pinning rather than sticking was to create the awareness of fragmentation and things not being a part of each other; disparate elements such as the book, the textual fragments, the drawings, the collages, the dreams which are placed together but which remain un-cohesive.

On reflection, there are always elements of the day or life which are  reworked into dreams.  Much of the work I produce is a result of these visual images,  or visa versa.  The Surrealists dealt extensively with this dream state and it is a valuable tool for processing information. Much of the work I produce is a result of these dream images.  I concur with the  Surrealists in this regard who dealt extensively with the dream state, “the central idea of the movement [being] to release the creative powers of the unconscious mind” (Chilvers, 576: 2003).

The altered book, aside from the inserted dreams, consists of visual fragments relevant to the articulated dream.  In this way I try to process reality from the imaginary, and combine the two.  This work also consists of disparate elements of  collage  which are part of my current book  works;  the beginnings and sometimes the ends of whole images ,  or even the ideas of images.  The reason for this is the fragments individually might not make any sense, but once collated into a book form a kind of logic – a personal logic.