Slumber Garden
There is a mind shift that comes with the arrival of evening. Orange and pink sunsets settle into violet as the day ends and night begins. The change of light ushers in a transition to a slower period after a day filled with moments of smaller, persistent transitions. Attention dissolves and refocuses with each new email, each person who arrives needing something, each text or phone call, and with the disruptive effects of scrolling on a device that is both the object of intense focus and a source of unparalleled distraction. Thought is fractured by moments of disordering necessitating recaptured focus to reorder. For persons living with dementia and their caregivers, evening can arrive with the accumulated confusion of the day, requiring skill and patience to navigate back to a reordered level.
Slumber Garden is lengths of differing moiré patterns meeting and bordering one another, creating intervals of shifting focus. Moiré patterns appear as images encounter each other, forming what art historian Jennifer L. Roberts describes as “irrational effects from the combination of rational elements.” Through scale and repetition, moiré “glitches” have space to settle into coherence.
Slumber Garden emerged through rhythm and repetition. Individual elements began as rolls of paper on a 16-foot table, screenprinted from end to end.