This shape was presented to me in a dream and I therefore take it to be a symbol of something that the Unconscious is using to communicate with my materiality.

I use compressed charcoal to try to materialise the dream. I do it in one gesture. The charcoal often snaps. I like that sensation of it snapping in mid-gesture and continuing on.

It may be an archetypal symbol of something like the creative impulse or of the destructive impulse.

It may be a symbol of a thing that is presented in dream.

It may be a symbol that denotes those objects that are members of the set of objects that are outside of all sets of objects that are in a set.

It may be a symbol that denotes those objects that are members of the set of objects that are outside of all sets of objects that are in a set because a subject is conscious of that being the case.

It may be a symbol that denotes an object that belongs to the set that contains all symbols that denote symbols.

Etc.

I am not sure which of these drawings, if any, are an accurate representation of the dream symbol. I am not sure that matters. I play with the idea of being driven mad by trying to reproduce the perfect representation in a sort of Borgean trap.

I see a woman on her knees. Head on the ground. Getting up, bowing down, genuflecting, stuck. Yogic. Defeated. Reviving. all of these. I see the white negative spaces like seeds and sperm, the black positives like ovum. I see toppled question marks. Neolithic tombs, igloos, tunnels, labyrinths, entrances, exits.

I see u-bends. Neat, curly heaps of turd.

But thats not how symbols work. They don’t represent. They exist in their own right.

They are not just a thing, or even a bridge, from the unknown to be translated into language. To become known.

They should be allowed to be, without interpretation or justification.