The Art of Dreaming by Miriam Morris
Untitled (part of ongoing series The Art of Dreaming).
The Art of Dreaming
New pieces of analogue photography and photomontages in response to dream works. Surrealist artists used dreams as a source of inspiration for their work, believing that dreams provided access to the unconscious mind and a way to explore the irrational forces of everyday life. I am collecting my dreams, interpreting them and making new work. The exhibition also hopes to spotlight the feminist surrealist artist, Grete Stern.
The surrealist Grete Stern was a German-Argentine photographer and photomontagist. who studied at the Bauhaus. She is a lesser-known feminist female surrealist, often overshadowed by male contemporaries of that time. In 1948 Stern began working for Idilio, an illustrated women's magazine, published specifically at lower/lower-middle class women of that time. Readers were encouraged to submit their dream and each week, one dream would be selected, analysed in depth, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. 2025 marks her 120th birthday.
Miriam Morris (she/her) is an Irish photographer, writer and artist living in Scotland. She works in both analogue and digital photography as well as mixed-media. She is a writer and photographer and PR consultant, promoting arts and culture across Scotland and internationally.
Miriam's work often expresses early surrealist aesthetics. Her solo show Mannequin (2023) explored how for surrealists, the mannequin was a reoccurring symbol in their art practice. Objects that were both animated and inanimate, human and material, sex and sexless, earthly yet dreamlike. They were often metaphors for life and death, dream states, disembodiment and the concept of the body as a vessel.
In this new on going series of work, inspired by Grete Stern's dreams photomontages, Miriam has made new work in response to dream journaling across a series of months. This is the first set of images in her The Art of Dreaming series.
