Nachtluftschlösser

Dora Lionstone | OD Photo Prize 2022

“The project Nachtluftschlösser (‘castles in the night air’) examines the construction of thoughts and realities and the perception of hidden dimensions. The desire to recreate a holographic house from a dream serves as a framework for visual thought constructs in the form of images, installations and projections at night. The inspiration for the project was a vivid nightmare: In the dream, I found myself inside a curious home when the walls suddenly became transparent. As I walked through them to the outside, I entered another dimension where nothing else existed. There, only the translucent outline of the building was still visible, glowing like a hologram. I feared: if I lost sight of this house, would everything I know cease to exist?

During the residency, ‘Silence Awareness Existence’ at Arteles in Finland, I set out to reconstruct this haunting yet elusive experience of the dream. Starting off with the creation of simple cubic forms, the complexity of the process grew with multiple (re-)construction steps and the combination of different techniques such as analogue and digital photography, collages and animations, as well as projections, models and installations. The project thus interweaves multiple layers: 2- and 3-dimensionality, light and darkness, illusion and reality. The holographic house becomes a metaphor for the mind, a complex system of interconnected building blocks, both concrete and fleeting. “If each thing one knows depends on other things one knows – isn’t that like castles built on air?” Marvin Minsky asks in his book The Society of Mind. Is the world we know like a house, solely constructed by our minds? And can we look through the walls of reality?” – Dora Lionstone, 2022

Follow Dora Lionstone

All print sales enquiries or to see more from this artist:
tom@opendoors.gallery