Karla Holland-Scholer

Ceramic, mixed media

I perceive my dreaming life to be an integral part of my waking life, subsequently I am drawn to the threshold between the two.  I am often compelled to include a literal threshold, doorway, or window in many of my artworks which psychologically opens the space and allows a flow between the inner and outer spaces.  I found the use of twilight in the 1985 movie “Ladyhawke” to be an apt analogy for this liminal space.  In the movie there are two lovers, Isabeau and Navarre, who have been cursed and must spend their lives apart.  As a result of the curse, Isabeau becomes a hawk by day, and Navarre becomes a wolf by night, “always together and eternally apart.”  They can only glimpse each other for a fleeting moment at twilight.  Remembering a dream is like standing in that twilight between two worlds.

The theatre or more aptly the stage has been a working metaphor in my art for more than thirty years.  As an undergraduate art student at the University of California, Davis I had the task of creating a stage set for three Sam Shepard plays that were performed in the Little Theatre next to the art department.   That experience was magical, and it has continued to inspire my work even today.  My paintings and sculptures are often like small stage sets or tableaus in which I can use “active imagination” to explore images and elements from my dreams that generate a dialogue between the painting and myself.  It is my hope that this dialogue is also created within the viewer. 

As an artist my process allows me to follow the dream in many directions.  My main concern is to make an image that has potency.   I trust that if I can create potency, it will also draw the viewer into the work and enable them to create meaning.  I research what simultaneously resonates with me in daily life and with the dream.  This may take me into a scientific or historic exploration of a particular object or place, or it may take me into literature and movies, or into folklore and myths.  What I enjoy is how the dream can help to re-animate or reenchant places and objects in the world.  I see my task as an artist as one in which I must coax, invite, or like a thief drag images, energy, and ideas across the threshold of the dreaming world into my waking life and into my paintings.  In the same way that Kami spirits in Japan must be invited to inhabit the mundane world, so must we make a place for sacred spirits, numens, and numinosity to live in our hopefully awakening world.