Dreams of Here

Art Review: Dreams of Here at Brighton Museum

Work by Julian Bell, Tom Hammick and Andrzej Jackowski

I recently went to an art exhibition in Brighton and here I saw the everyday create the uncanny before my eyes.

As you walk through the three joining rooms, separating each artist's work, you pass through different levels of consciousness, where reality slides into dreams.

The exhibition begins in the explosively colourful and bright white space which belongs to the work of Julian Bell. His pieces are large, evoking seemingly mundane scenes but the oil painted canvases jump out at you. The everyday objects range from the soft, subdued warm pinks and blues of 'Rain': colours reflecting the peaceful, romantic fall of rain against a bedroom window. To 'Darvaza' which captures in vivid detail an erupting volcano, the brightness giving movement and life to the whole room.

The second room contains the artwork of Tom Hammick. After leaving the solid reality, bold colours and physicality of Bell's work; this tentatively lit, all encompassing dark blue space, invites an insight into Hammick's dreaming mind. The subject is real objects; people, trees or nature but these everyday depictions are morphed by the mind. There is an unearthly, uncanny serenity that binds these pieces: you feel you are seeing the world through dreaming eyes. Speaking of his work Hammick said: 'painting distils time;' sentiments which are palpable in his work. You feel you are catching snippets of memories, fragments of time frozen but in a random order: much like a dream.

Lastly you enter a light pink room, exhibiting Andrzej Jackowski's collection: 'The voyage, a still film.' These pieces are more surreal and unnerving than the previous; we have moved away from the real or the dream and are now deeper into the mind. This room grabs me the most but in a creeping, inconspicuous way. In Jackowski's words: 'this is a place of memory, of thinking.' The collection of 60 drawings are linked by the ‘Baltic brown‘, bloody red and common recurring objects: such as the heron’s head, ladders, and hanging figures. The heron’s head is a menacing, watchful figure, unknown and voyeuristic. Themes of violence and sex course though the drawings, suspending you (like many of the figures) in this haunted world. The uncanny is a haunting of the everyday, a fissure in our seemingly substantial reality.

I left the exhibition in a pensive daze, knocked out by the stunning vivacity of Bell's work, hypnotised by the beautiful blue dreams Hammick paints and unnerved but engrossed from Jackowski's creations.

Through the Looking Glass: another Alice

I have posted twice about Alice simply to slice apart the twinned Alice books.

Alice enters the Looking Glass world by climbing through her living room mirror. This world is a reflection or double of the world Alice leaves. Therefore everything is backwards; objects, people and places are at once similar and opposing. The initial recognition or familiarity of the Looking Glass world becomes unfamiliar when we take a closer look. It is this strange combining of the familiar and unfamiliar which makes the Looking Glass world unnerving and uncanny. By entering this world Alice becomes her own reflection. She can now move autonomously without being watched or copied by the mirror reflection. There are two Alices but which are we dealing with?

Freud describes in The Uncanny that ‘what is Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.’ By entering the mirror Alice is situated in her home but also not her home, as it is a reflection of or the opposite of her home. Home is both home and not home. Comparable to the way the word Heimlich can mean the same as and also the opposite of unheimlich. This inversion and double meaning, or things meaning both the same and the opposite is bound into the fabric of the Looking Glass world and also the feeling and concept of the uncanny. The uncanny is different and the same, it is a happening but also an un-happening of things, disturbing our sense of what has or hasn’t happened: a questioning.

A feeling of strangeness comes from the Tweedles insistence that Alice is only a part of the Red Kings dream and so she is not real. In Wonderland her size changes and she questions and forgets who she is. This strange questioning of the self is pushed further in the Looking Glass, when her materiality is made uncertain. Is she real? The Tweedles’ answer is no, and that if the Red King woke she would ’go out-bang-like a candle.’ This image draws on her already questionable materiality. She fears ’going out altogether, like a candle,’ her physical presence is no more solid than an exposed, flickering flame. Alice’s effect on the Looking Glass world is challenged, as the Tweedles assert she couldn’t wake the King as she is in his dream. What an odd feeling to be consciously aware of yourself in another’s dreaming mind. She is unable to justify her realness, she cant make herself real either through action (crying) or language (stating ‘I am real‘)

The Tweedles continually talk in negatives, no-one nobody nowhere nothing. These express the absence of something. Negative speech here goes around defining. Speaking in negatives is a circumlocution that evades meaning, this is the effect of the Tweedles’ speech on Alice. This creates confusion, if everything is expressed or described by what it isn’t. Alice would apparently be ‘nowhere’ if the Red King woke up but can you actually be nowhere? And where is this nowhere if this is where she will be?

Language and meaning in the Looking Glass are both powerful and effective or circular and fail definition. Language can initiate action in the book, making things happen. For example the Queen turns into a sheep through the augmentation of the word better into a bleat. Language is at once active and passive; Alice feels, most palpably, the uncanny failure of language to affirm the absence of the presence of something (her). Freud states that the double has become a vision of terror, a terror Alice becomes acutely aware of as it defines the absence of herself. The slipperiness of meaning makes Through the Looking Glass a strangely resounding text. The text is haunted by the parallel world which is the other side of the mirror and the questions suspended in uncertainty.

Alice in Wonderland: my own private rabbit hole

What makes Alice in Wonderland uncanny?

I first read Alice in Wonderland as a child, I then re-read it years later. The book I knew as a child and the one I was reading as an adult were vastly different in feeling and meaning. It created two versions of the book in my mind that jostled with one another. This was the first thing I found uncanny about Alice. Second was the first chapter: The Pool of Tears.

After falling down the rabbit hole Alice finds herself in a long hallway. The hall has every appearance of normalcy, however in this seemingly mundane hall, strange things start to occur. It is precisely the ordinariness of the hall which makes the events to follow peculiar. A table materialises with a key on top of it which doesn’t fit any of the door locks. It is exactly this conglomeration of familiar and unfamiliar things which leaves Alice, and so the reader, unnerved and curious as to what to expect next. Alice’s uncertainty of her situation and disorientation due to the dislocation in time and space, causes her to weep a pool of tears.



The complete effacement of a spatial and temporal anchor is distressing. The focus on tears in this chapter points to use of the word as more than one meaning. Namely, to tear something or to tear, e.g move at speed.

Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole creates a tear in time. The space she is located in is in-between reality and fantasy, a world in which the two collide. The physical world of wonderland is apt to morph, objects or creatures which appear to be substantial can in a moment disintegrate; such as the Cheshire cat. Comparably she chases logical avenues of thought but they result in nonsensical answers. It can be uncanny when the demarcation between reality and fantasy slides, and each spills over into the next.



The dislodgment of a time reference is noticeable in the cycle or a temporal glitch Alice seems to be stuck in. Firstly her thoughts circumnavigate from questioning her identity to reciting her lessons. The uncertainty of her surroundings causes her to doubt the solidity of her identity. This circular cognitive pattern is reflected in her speech. She repeats certain words; ‘curiouser and curiouser’ or ‘dear dear.’ This repetition is Alice’s way of consoling herself, as she attempts to hold onto a sense of reality. However through the reiteration of a word or thought its meaning unravels; becoming, especially if said or read aloud, just a sequence of nonsensical noises. What she believes will anchor her, in fact, further destabilises her world. The sense of time in wonderland is endless, circular or static. There is no beginning or end; such as in the caucus race everyone ’left off when they liked’ and so it was ‘not easy to tell when the race was over.’ Or it is stuck in a loop, it’s always teatime for the mad hatter.

Time does move in wonderland, as the tea party moves around the table but the direction isn’t necessarily linear. The introduction to wonderland creates an uncanny effect through the interplay of words, images and ideas that repeat, reflect and negate each other. The reader and Alice are unsettled in every sense and at every turn. When we feel we have finally made sense of wonderland; Carroll shakes and flips the ground and we find ourselves back at the beginning of the adventure, or quite possibly at the end.