Welded steel, 70 x 20 x 23, 2007.
A headdress normally announces rank to onlookers. A dreamer’s would give the dream a place to enter and a place to stay, and this one has the features for both.
It’s a tall hollow shell, far larger than the head beneath it. A ring with an oval opening sits on its side above the ear. A pierced crest runs along the top edge, and a thin rod tipped with a ball stands up like an aerial. Each is a way in, for sound, for light, for signal. A dream isn’t composed by the sleeper. It comes from elsewhere and the sleeper receives it, and the headdress is built as the receiver.
Its size matches what it receives. The dream takes up more room than the head that holds it, and the oversized shell shows that proportion. Its mass also sits above and behind the face, outside the dreamer’s own line of sight. The face itself is young and slack, with plaited hair and slightly parted lips, and it shows no awareness of the structure it carries.
The bust shrinks everything below the neck to a fringed shoulder piece on a slender turned stem. All the weight is in the head and the headdress, which are the parts that dream.
