Dear Salvador,

I write to you of a vividly reoccurring dream that has quite fixated me. I thought this might help to unravel its meaning. I have read that you yourself sought out new compositions for work at the edge of your unconsciousness. Using a falling spoon to startle you into wakefulness from the threshold of sleep, so that your conscious mind could glimpse a new possibility. It is for this reason I decided to turn this waking dream into a small painting, to manifest it and so remove it from the recesses of my mind. This has definitely helped to satisfy my unconscious fixation with the subject of the dream, as since its completion, I have been no longer troubled by it. I’m now only perplexed as to its meaning and origins.

In the dream I saw a strange orchid, with a vividly patterned tongue, sprouting out of the crack in a woman’s forehead. I would wake in shock to see this vision in front of my eyes as she very slowly dissolved into shadow. Dreams that follow me into consciousness are not new to me, but in the past they had been obvious expressions of anxiety. Like one time sleep walking into another room to warn the person sleeping there of a large black spider, the size of a fruit bowl. I could point to it before it slowly faded as I became fully conscious once more. This dream was unusual in that it did not follow a recognisable phobia. It was odd.

I began to think of you as I suspect the seed of this dream was originally planted in my mind by your work. It struck me as interesting how the figure in my dream mirrored the figure in your ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ (1937). I looked at this painting frequently when finishing my Masters at the beginning of 2017, however I didn't write about it at the time. The seed within this work, which is simultaneously the head of Narcissus from the greek myth out of which sprouts a daffodil, seems to have planted itself literally within my own unconscious mind. My dream however only fully germinated a year after I saw your work in Montmartre in 2019. Specifically after seeing those drawing of female figures who’s heads had been replaced by flower bunches.

The figure from my dream had no specific identity, she was just ‘female’. Other than it being daylight, the only details I could discern about the space around her was that there was an intangible, limitless horizon with formless objects in the distance. I somehow knew that she couldn’t move in that strange way you know things in dreams.

Translating this dream into drawings and then paint, transformed the composition further. The flower disappeared as I realised she herself was the flower my unconscious mind tired to pluck. To bring forward to the surface of consciousness. I realised that I could model the figure on ‘The Venus de Milo’ from the Louvre, that ancient greek Hellenistic sculpture you are very familiar with and frequently reference. This was for a few reasons. Firstly, both the figure from my dream and the Venus seemed to manifest a kind of archetypal idea of ‘female’. Secondly, both are rooted in place, unable to move. Thirdly, the lack of arms removes even the possibility of communicating by gesture, and as both figures cannot talk, her quiet powerlessness was clearly expressed. I painted my own reflection in the position of this sculpture, as this dream comes through me. She has no arms or legs, as in my dream the figure was rooted in place.

The floor of my studio has receded into a distant horizon where cliffs stand. These were drawn from sketches made off the coastline of Malta and the surrounding Mediterranean Sea, a place where my maternal grandparents both came from. This felt like an appropriate representation for the distant landscape in my dream, as both feel simultaneously familiar and alien. I believe it can also stand in for the unknowable expanse of the unconscious mind.

The life sized transparent hand that reaches for the figure represents my consciousness pulling her out of my dreams into real life. The position of this hand was drawn from your hand in the ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’.

I thought it would be interesting to include the disembodied arm of the sculpture, as though these fragments still existed, to explore the intentions of the figure from my dream… her overlooked unspoken desires. As I had the sense that she did not want to be pulled out of my dream, I depicted this hand palm facing out, as though trying to ward off the larger hand from plucking her out of the confines of the picture plane.

The pomegranate on the bottom left hand corner is a fruit that my grandfather grows. I have always associated it with the myth of Persephone. A goddess of fertility who ate six seeds from a pomegranate which condemned her to live for a period of each year in the Underworld, presiding over the dead. All because of Hades desire… And so for me, the pomegranate represents desire bridging two worlds. To bring something from one, temporarily into another. In light of the fact that my dream figure did not seem to give her consent, this fruit seemed especially appropriate to bring her to consciousness. A fruit which when cracked open has a peculiar visual similarity to a vulva.

Yours truly,
Natasha Walsh