How to Sleep
Daniel Mackenzie
There is something strangely alluring about the passage one travels, through a small point of access, between two larger environments. Hanway Street in Central London for instance, the narrow through way that joins Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, has a strange appeal—not just as it’s home to Bradley’s, the cult Spanish pub caught in a nostalgic and atmospheric space in time. It’s more than that. It’s a route that exists between spaces, and travelling that route offers a moment to pause, to contemplate the minutiae between the chaos.
Such contemplation becomes poignant when the access point exists not between spaces but between states—of consciousness, of metaphysics, of dimensions. In Alice in Wonderland, our enchanted protagonist, leaves the familiar world for a surreal and expansive realm of endless possibilities by climbing through a mirror. When we sleep, we close our curtains and doors. We make our world smaller and darker. We prepare for the potential to travel to the domain of dreams and their connective memories.
In Mia Middleton’s work the edge of the canvas, or the frame in which it sits, is a boundary around the work in a purely physical sense only. Her intimate studies of objects, people and places are modestly small windows into an environment which unfolds in the imagination first of the artist, and then the viewer. Like that little London street, like Alice’s mirror, they are passages between spaces.
The paintings are informed in part by the artist’s memories and emotionally charged experiences, coalescing into a perceivable identity in parallel with their creation, rather than existing as fully formed ideas first. The process reflects our way of forming more detailed definition within thoughts or memories, letting their stories complexify over time from a vague fog of cognitive sensation.
Mia’s work may loosely reference the path of her own life –severing this tie completely is near impossible for any artist and their work– but it is not strictly autobiographical or personal and laid bare for us merely as onlookers. Instead we are invited to allow these paintings to activate our own imaginations, and our own memories.
Storytelling and the subconscious play important roles in Mia’s work. Viewing a number of paintings in one space allows each work to exist in the context of another, in the context of the room, and providing the means for each visitor to drape over them their fractured interior narrative. They exist as signposts, points of reference, echoing the way we tend to remember dreams as a series of images and moments rather than a full stretch of lived time in motion. In stories presented by the work, they are the chapters but they do not speak for the whole. Giving more away than they would would interrupt the ephemeral fluidity that makes them so captivating.
In terms of tonality, the darkened hues in the paintings ask us to think truthfully about how we remember parts of our dreams. Are they colourful, soft-focused, illuminated in ethereal light? Or are they shrouded in shadow, the eternal twilight symbolizing our inability to ever properly recall the details of their scenes? The nature and function of memory itself is here placed under scrutiny.
Ultimately, Mia seeks to step into, and between, these ideas but not settle for too long on any one of them. For all the innate elegance and composure presented, her visions are brief glimpses of order in the grand procession of entropy and chaos, in a galactic and collectively psychological sense. Our shared dreams, emotions and experiences themselves fall towards dissolution, and as their individual characteristics spill out over their boundaries, her work will remain –until physical reality itself turns to dust, taking Bradley’s and the whole of Hanway Street with it– as points of focus in humanity’s shared memory.