"A Monument to Dreaming Together" (2021) - Digital Collage - Anthony D Kelly

My piece in response to the “Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream" project in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland, as part of the Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival.

See my statement below:

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” - James Baldwin

To dream is to embark on a ubiquitous and mystical human experience. We each engage in nightly expeditions into the vast wildness of our own inner expanse, embarking on nocturnal journeys through the uncharted hinterlands of the self. Contact with this emergent space often churns forth inspirational ideas, creative insights and integrative experiences, possessed of a form of deep intelligence that is unfamiliar in our waking lives. Recent sleep research has even implicated dreaming as an integral element in the mind’s inherent capacity to process and heal from traumatic events.

Dreaming is also synonymous with the ability to look beyond, and to envision new and better futures, both personal and collective. Indeed the simple statement of “I have a dream…” evokes the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his speech itself an act of collective dreaming that opened new pathways for discourse and lived possibilities. Also in listening to the history of Birr, there is much evidence of the town as a powerful site for collective dreaming. For example, the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown; a literal device constructed for the purpose of seeing far beyond our own world, and peering into the unknown heavens. And the Cáin Adomnáin or Law of The Innocents that came about as a result of the Synod of Birr in 697AD. This agreement was a prototype for the Geneva Convention and the first such accord to protect innocents during wartime, envisioning and enacting a better future.

Our world today is one of many crises. Humanity is struggling, as a people we are deeply troubled, fractured, isolated, grief stricken and traumatised. This is why now, possibly more than ever, we need new sites and spaces to gather, heal and relearn the ancient art of dreaming together.

All works from this outstanding project will be published in a book from Kolaj Magazine to mark the exhibition this can be preordered here.