A new solo exhibition in Valletta, The Sound of You Dreaming by Paul Scerri, invites viewers to experience and consider the hinterland we visit nightly in our sleep through narrative-based figurative sculpture. With a contemplative physicality and an ethereal lightness of touch, the artist draws on his own experiences and, gently, those of his family.

“Dreams are a rupture in the process of understanding the world because they contradict everyday notions of time and space,” says curator Gabriel Zammit, “but at the same time they also contain strange and deep truths, both personal and collective”.

With surface detail and rich texture, Scerri works through these ideas, exploring the contradictions that govern the unfolding of human lives using a stylised visual language he has honed over 42 years working with ceramics.

As light dances and fabrics float and billow, visitors are transported into a world of dreams and invited to sit and rest to a background soundscape of white noise. It’s an atmospheric immersion into the borderlands of wakefulness and awareness, familiar and yet other-worldly.

The Burden of Dreams

Although the visitor feels cocooned inside (and deep within the bastion walls of St James Cavalier, you always feel a long way from the day-to-day life on the streets), and large black-out blinds, drawn over all the windows in the space block out the outside world, the first series of seven standing figures all hold clouds.

Clouds commonly represent the ephemeral and mystical and are, Scerri explains, synonymous with dreams. And yet one of his figures, a piece called The Burden of Dreams, is carrying a cloud like a heavy load. Dreams are not always celestial or sugar-sweet, and this show focuses not on their interpretation but rather on the way they form and their felt experience.

“I’ve always been intrigued by dreams,” says Scerri.

“In a person’s creative life, whether that’s painting or writing poetry, they are in sole control of what they create. However, dreams are entirely different in that, even though our brains create them, they are imposed upon us. Apart from the occasional ‘lucid dream’ dreams are not within an individual’s control.

The artist found physical manifestations of the many symbolic elements and items, such as keys and a funnel, that he had already included in his work.

“My curiosity in dreams dates back to when I was four or five years old, and I had a nightmare which I can still recall vividly. I was always curious about why a child would have a nightmare at that age, especially given Carl Jung’s suggestion that nightmares are the result of conflict and emotional upset in the unconscious mind.

Just like memories submerged in time, dreams and artistic practice both return to us the objects that we have lost and forgotten

“Ahead of this exhibition I asked three psychologists and they all talked of epigenetics and intergenerational trauma which travels from generation to generation through our DNA.”

In the childhood nightmare that haunts him, Scerri found himself trying to pass through a field riddled with holes in the ground, and he wonders whether this has had a bearing on the symbolic perforations he includes in much of his work. It’s an intriguing question, how much of the past appears in our dreams us unbeknownst to us.

The works explore the contradictions that govern the unfolding of human lives.

“Coincidentally after my father passed away last year, I came across documents, hand-written in beautiful calligraphy, religious texts and journals dating back to 1821. I used these as a symbolic way to interpret intergenerational trauma.”

Scerri has incorporated the inscriptions from these journals into some of his figures.

“Interestingly, the colours of these journals, with their sepia pages and faded inks consolidated the same palette I was already using to create the works for this exhibition. I had chosen these colours to be slightly misty and give a dreamlike feeling.”

Scerri describes how, before his mother married, she lived in a house in Qala with his great-grandmother and grandfather, a place where he often stayed as a small child.

Returning to that house many years later, he found physical manifestations of the many symbolic elements and items, such as keys and a funnel, that he had already included in his work. And so, it seems that just like memories submerged in time, dreams and artistic practice both return to us the objects that we have lost and forgotten.

Scerri has honed his stylised visual language over 42 years working with ceramics.

The influence of these items on Scerri’s subconscious and his artistic practice is evident in the exhibition. Some of the works stand on plinths that include drawers or doors inside which smaller works, objects, and symbols, tell a story.

For the exhibition ‘finale’, a bed was brought to Spazju Kreattiv from the Gozitan house of Scerri’s childhood. “The bed implies the whole story of an individual’s life,” he explains.

“We are born on a bed. We were likely conceived on a bed; and will probably end our days on a bed, after a lifetime of dreaming.”

Sponsored by Arts Council Malta, The Sound of You Dreaming runs until March 9 in Space C at Spazju Kreattiv.