Dream Log

Megan Kennedy

Interview by C. VanWinkle

June 6, 2022

Can you please describe for me the prompt that you responded to?

It was an illustration, maybe with some watercolor, and it had a distressed shadowy figure with eyes in it. It had writing in French that translated to, “I dreamed of you last night.”

Do you know any French?

I don't. I put it through Google translate, so hopefully it’s right!

What did you think of it? Do you remember your first impression?

I liked it when I saw it, straight up. I thought it was something I could definitely work with. It made me think of nightmares a lot, maybe night terrors, hallucinations, that sort of thing. I guess I can identify with that because I suffer from the same thing quite frequently. It was really good to build on that.

Oh wow, that made it very personal!

Definitely. It was really interesting.

What kind of sleeper are you?

Pretty bad. I have a sleep disorder, which makes things a bit more difficult in terms of sleeping. That's why I identified so well with it.

Do you usually record your dreams? Do you usually keep a log?

No, not usually. And I thought this was a good opportunity to see what would happen. I remembered more dreams than I thought I would. When I started the project, I thought I'd remember four or five, because I try to put them out of my mind or they tend to disappear quickly. But over the time period, I got eleven dreams. So that was that was interesting. Thinking about dreams helps to put a dampener on how terrifying they can be sometimes. It was a very meditative process. I found it therapeutic.

That is really fortunate!

Yeah, I didn't have to stop in the middle or anything.

Are you often inspired by dreams? How do they affect your work?

Yes, though not as literally as I made my piece, which is very symbol heavy. But concepts come to me in my sleep, and I work with them quite frequently.

How did you start this piece?

I've been thinking about incorporating dreams into my work a bit more readily. So I saw it and I thought there was definitely ritual that could be brought out of it. You know, I could have a dream, write it down, stitch it into fabric and see what comes of it.

You have other mediums that you work in. Why did you go with something textile?

I trained as a photographer, but when I make textiles and stuff, it's a lot more of a physical process. So I took stitching up a few years ago. I'm not particularly good at it, but I find the gestural quality is hard to emulate in another field.

I know what you mean. When I first got into digital drawing, that’s all I did for a while, but more recently I've gotten back to getting-my-hands-dirty art. It's a different experience when it's on your face and under your fingernails.

It's a great feeling! It's very cathartic.

However, drawing is pretty similar whether you're doing it digitally or traditionally, but stitching and photography are completely different.

That's true, it's a bit of a mismatch, but it's good. I can document my textile work photographically, so it does work for me.

How does this particular piece relate to the rest of your work?

Mainly, dreams are probably the key factor that unites all the work. I see patterns and matchups in my sleep that I like to apply to textiles later. And this one being about dreams, it coincides with the theme quite neatly.

How does it relate to your photography?

I photograph ideas and things a lot. I bring a camera around with me pretty much wherever I go, so if I see things, like patterns and textures which I'd like to emulate, I take photos of them and then use them as reference material.

Do you find working from a prompt to be more limiting or more freeing?

Definitely more freeing. I do have a lot of ideas going around in my head all the time. And I found that, having a prompt, I thought, “You need to respond to this. Use your time. Get into it.” It was really useful.

Do you work from prompts often?

No, this was my first one! It was good. I hope to do more.

How are you with deadlines?

Good. I keep to deadlines. Otherwise, it gets chaotic. You don't know when anything is going to end, so if you have a deadline, it's like, all right. This is finished. You're done. Move on.

I agree. Having a deadline can also help me know when I'm finished.

Yeah! It's hard to figure out. You can always do more, but sometimes it's better not to.

I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Oh, that's cool.

I only have one more question for you. What is your advice for someone else approaching this project?

For me, I found it really helpful to internalize the prompt. I didn't just want to respond to it as a style or copy or anything like that. I wanted to see how it applied to me. So maybe investing some personal emotions or associations into the work is what I found really helpful.

Call Number: C72VA | C74VA.keDre

Megan Kennedy is an artist living in Canberra, Australia. An interest in the perception of space, communication, data, materiality, subjective experience, process, chronic illness and incidental interventions has led her to experiment with a range of visual media. More of Megan's work can be found at megankennedy.art and on Instagram at mk_photodiary and at mk_textile_work.