RUI LIU (She/Her)
The essential quality of dreams is, according to Sigmund Freud, a form of wish-fulfilment, the ‘dynamic unconscious’ is expansive and develops while we sleep, allowing us to imagine and visualise our very deepest desires. During the pandemic and the enforced lockdown, socially remote from friends and family, these dream states became powerful signifiers of longing and imagining. This series of jewellery designs are the result of an exploration of ‘dream works’, as Freud named them, fabricated by the sub-conscious, heightened in isolation. The pieces incorporate colorful, everyday materials and metals which create stable structures and volume, but they also express aspects of Surrealist, dreamlike evanescence and uncanny qualities, all of which are explored in psychoanalytic theory. Each piece is connected to dreams as another way of thinking and processing; abstracted in material form, these objects can be traced back to what seems like a dream world fantasy in response to an intolerable reality. However, this is not wholly true, as times and meanings merged during those days and practice became indeterminate. Slowly, the dream works were captured, fixed in these small representations of a period mired by invisible external forces, such that even Surrealist artists could hardly imagine.
A DREAMER: the bracelet#1
I’m locked in the dream.
A DREAMER: the bracelet#2
Two similar dreams are like twins. Similar but different.
A DREAMER: the brooch
We dance, we laugh, we party in the dream.
A DREAMER: the earring
The colour maze will never end.
A DREAMER: the necklace
Something/someone that you want desperately, but are they hiding from you? In the end, you and the thing/person was circling around.
A DREAMER: the ring#1
Climbing the tree,
Climbing the mountain,
Climbing the rebar and building…
A DREAMER: the ring#2
How does it look like when you throw liquid paint onto the wall?
A DREAMER: the shoulder piece
What is fatal poison means to you?