A Lifelong Mission Documenting The Other Side

I was thrown into the powerful world of plant magic at a young age. No map, no guide, no teacher, no cultural lineage, no support network, no direction. Instead, I was hurled headfirst into a hyper-colored dream world with talking plant spirits. Each experience compounded and bent all the rules of reality: strange visual imagery, telepathic communications, precognition of events, encounters with entities, exotic aesthetics, information woven into geometric patterns, hidden worlds. I was experiencing the impossible on a weekly basis. I realized that these were the fundamental mysteries that many cultures had spoken about and engaged with. They were vast, complex, and interconnected. Despite being in Adidas sneakers, in the corner of a bedroom, I too was experiencing astoundingly beautiful and intricate visual worlds beyond my wildest dreams.

I was working with plant magic before I became an artist. I had never wanted to make art before. The art world seemed very foreign and disconnected from what I was experiencing, from my culture. Rothko’s and Warhol’s works were not my idea of beauty. Instead, I began making art for a functional reason. I knew I needed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs on my way in and out of the rabbit holes I was experiencing. I was logging visual snap- shots of some of the peculiar details I saw. The images were never designed for public appreciation; they were my diary entries as I explored. I essentially worked in isolation for over a decade, repeating the same process of experiencing wild encounters on the other side and documenting them in artworks. For me, art was a tool. It wasn’t to express my feelings—it was to help capture the unique things I was seeing. It was a scientific pursuit first and foremost, which used the arts as the data source to document strange and invisible landscapes.

The most curious detail of all to me was how formal researchers were studying this phenomenology without the use of art. It was the only method to bring back artifacts from that space, as there is no camera, telescope, microscope, X-ray machine or dreamscanner to do it for you. Artists suddenly become the only astronauts, or psychonauts perhaps, capable of going into these invisible geometric caves without their bodies, with only their minds, and bringing back the details for the wider research field to analyze. Sensing the scale of importance, I immediately undertook a PhD program on the topic. In the research, the deep gap between the specializations of art and science became clear.

Some interdisciplinary research projects were being done, but they felt tokenistic or symbolic of the pursuit, perhaps limited by the projects they were working on. Working at some of the major universities in Australia during this time, there were few others actively pushing to expand the role of the arts into the sciences. I did not complete the PhD because the university withdrew support, as the research was unable to fit the mold of existing outcomes. As this formal route of research was closed and darkened, in private, the underground research space continued and brightened.

The major contribution of my work is the functional use of the arts. Deep down, I feel like art has been a general exploration of the potential in visual aesthetics drawn up from the imagination. The imagination is fundamentally a simple process of cognition: It takes various inputs existing in the external world and recombines them into new, non-existing outputs. The limits of the imagination are intrinsically bound by this process. The pool of material with which you feed the machine determines the output limits. Despite the illusion of an unlimited source of novelty, the imagination is not capable of such. The art world is currently focused on documenting creativity that is sourced from the standard imagination pool. However, the most unique visual artifacts will be created when novel source material outside the existing pool is experienced. This deep fundamental difference in how the artist lives their life before touching a canvas results in highly different aesthetic and taste profiles. There is no way to mimic the peculiar quality that emerges in artists who have seen unique imagery that is difficult to access and few others have ever seen before.

My goal with the twelve works for the Secrets exhibition has been to create a series of works that move through a wide gamut of historical time periods and cultural spaces, using both first-person and third-person perspectives, indigenous and suburban, visionary worlds of the plant visions. But the truth is, none of these works really captures the true beauty and complexity of the visual worlds I have experienced. I am endlessly filled with a sense of disappointment and the inability to achieve the mission that embodies Sleepr. Perhaps this is the real story after all, of one man trying, and trying, in the quest to transcend the limits of being human. But, there is one thing that I can promise you dear reader: I will not stop trying. It is a lifetime quest, my destiny, and rain, hail or shine, I will unlock the secrets of the other side.