Reimagining Sleep (Exhibition Catalogue)

Reimagining Sleep Exhibition catalogue

A E I

O U

Love Love Love

Love Love Love

Hate Hate Hate

Hate Hate Hate

A E I O U A E I O U

A E I O U

Sleep, Shakespeare famously writes in Macbeth, is what “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care”, that is, sleep soothes our worries and restores us ahead of the next day, just like knitting can repair a frayed sleave. But what happens when sleep fails to deliver on this promise? Through a workshop series, we came together to share our stories of sleep difficulties and reimagine our relationship with sleep via creativity.

We sought to foster different ways of thinking about sleep in a world that all too often frames it as either a waste of time – the “sleep is for losers” or “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” ethos – or as a tool for productivity – think of the various sleep-tracking devices that market their promised sleep improvements as means to perform better during the day. Outside of these dominant narratives, what do sleep and sleeplessness mean for each of us?

This was one of the key questions underpinning the gentle and playful explorations led by artist and curator Chiara Dellerba at the workshop series and, now, the resulting works collected in the Reimagining Sleep online exhibition.

Living with sleep issues can feel quite lonely, as we lie awake while everybody else around us seems to be asleep. Helping people connect not just to the meanings sleep has for them but to each other was a crucial part of the workshop series. We hope you’ll enjoy viewing the exhibition, and will consider becoming part of this community and helping it grow, by downloading the toolkits, exploring your relationship with sleep through creative exercises, and uploading the results on the website.

Dr Diletta De Cristofaro Principal Investigator Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project

The Sleep Charity is committed to empowering the nation to sleep better. We recognise that cultural change needs to take place so that sleep can be given the priority in our society that it both needs and deserves.

We are delighted to support the Reimagining Sleep project, which allows us to explore important questions about sleep in a unique way. Chiara Dellerba has creatively developed an innovative way of connecting a community, whilst reducing feelings of isolation and empowering people with sleep knowledge.

We hope that you enjoy exploring the online exhibition as much as we have enjoyed contributing to it and that you will become part of this important, new community.

Sleep well!

Vicki Beevers CEO and Founder of The Sleep Charity

Reimagining Sleep is an online exhibition and co-production project that investigates how creativity can support and develop sleepbased academic research. The exhibition highlights the many ways in which creativity communicates, entertains, and reveals underexplored paths for those interested in sleep, and especially for those living with sleep difficulties.

The exhibition gathers an extensive collection of objects, artefacts, samples, writings, and soundscapes made by, with, and for people affected by sleep’s relationship to three themes: Sleep and Parenting Sleep and Ageing Sleep and Menopause Reimagining Sleep is a project which places coproduction at its core. The exhibition continues this by encouraging all those who engage with it to themselves become co-producers. Our goal is to connect and involve multiple voices in order to foster openness, transparency, accessibility, and experimentation in sleep research. You are invited to collaborate with us in this ongoing process of participatory conversation, knowledge-sharing, and content development.

This is Reimagining Sleep’s unfolding, “organic”, and open-source ethos. On this website, you can access free toolkits and contribute to the exhibition by submitting your responses to the toolkits’ instructions. Everyone becomes an active agent in this project of sleep.

All the artworks populating Reimagining Sleep pose questions about sleep and living. What can we do to better understand the connections between our sleep and the conditions or scenarios that produce it? What creative approaches can we develop to investigate, find solutions for, or simply inhabit the discomfort determined by lack of sleep? We understand each artwork as a fragmented and poetic attempt to produce and share knowledge about sleep collectively. Each embraces radical approaches to research and health. Each also offers a space for the cross-pollination of ideas, identities, and forms – between design and contemporary art – across sleep-related fields of study.

Sleep and Parenting

The Sleep and Parenting collection explores how common scenarios during the first few years of parenting affect our sleep patterns and, consequently, our mood, behaviour, and approaches to everyday life. Questions, reflections, provocations, as well as actions and playful exercises have gradually informed and shaped a collaborative deck of cards which you can view here.

The Sleep and Parenting deck is designed to help introduce positive habits into the everyday of raising children, while also offering creative tools to look after mental health and well-being.

The cards focus on simple and explorative tasks such as slow reading, mindful drawings, and basic design compositions revolving around four three areas: Reflection, Pause, and Decompress.

All the tasks are developed in response to various experiences collected throughout the duration of the project. The design is freely inspired by symbols and imagery from Tarot decks, re-purposed specifically for this project.

For as long as this deck of cards is on display and free to download, visitors can provide their own inputs. Help the collection of cards grow by submitting your own unique “Task to spread Reflection, Pause, and Decompress” via the Sleep and Parenting co-production toolkit available on this page. In doing so, you will take part in the co-productive ethos of this project.

All the artworks on display are co-produced by Chiara Dellerba in collaboration with project participants. Special thanks to Dr Pam Alfonso-Miller for her expert input on the topic of sleep and parenting and to the project Research Assistant, Dr James Rákóczi, for his support throughout.

This online exhibition, curated by Chiara Dellerba, is part of the wider Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement Grant led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro.

Decompress

Decompress

Write the word “Calm” as slowly as you can

Create a space to slow down for yourself or the ones around you

Over a period of 15 minutes write the word “Calm” only once with your pencil moving continuously without leaving the paper.

Decompress

Decompress

n.1 card _back

n.1 card _front

n.2 card _back Reflection

Decompress

Remember a moment between wakefulness and sleep

Stay still and do nothing Find a place in the middle of a quiet room. Sit on a chair or lie down on the floor at the centre of the room.

Do nothing ultil your body requires it.

Capture your feeling with a word or a drawing.

Reflection

Decompress

n.3 card _back

n.3 card _front

Pause

n.4 card _back

n.4 card _front

Pause

Lie down on the floor first thing in the morning, last thing at night

Move your eyes from side to side slowly and repetitively

Find a calm space.

Lie down,stretch your body making a star shape.Pause with your eyes closed and your palms down. Imagine the grass tickling your fingers.

Find a calm space.

Lie down, move your eyes slowly side to side keeping your head still. After 10 times, stop and close your eyes.

Pause

Pause

n.5 card _back

n.2 card _front

n.5 card _front

n.6 card _back

n.6 card _front

Decompress

Reflection

Love Love Love

Love Love Love

Write about one thing that you love.

Write about one thing that you hate

Write continuously without getting your pen off the paper, without editing yourself.

Hate Hate Hate

Hate Hate Hate

Reflection

n.7 card _back

A E I

A E I O U

O U

A E I O U

A E I O U

n.7 card _front

n.8 card _back

n.8 card _front

Reflection

Take a small amount of clay and roll it into a ball

Make a dream reconfiguration Doodle on paper a scene from a dream. Then cut the paper in pieces and find different reconfigurations to your dream. Try many times until you find the one that you like the most.

Push your thumb in the middle of the ball, gently.

With your thumb in the centre of the clay ball and your fingers on the outside begin pinching from the bottom to the top to make a small sculpture. When finished, keep it in your hands for a few seconds.

Reflection

Reflection

n.9 card _front

Pause

n.10 card _back

n.10 card _front

Pause

Make a breathing score

Massage your palms, fingers and thumbs.

Close your eyes and breathe deeply.

With your hand make a mark on paper that corresponds with the rythm of your breath.

When you get to the end of the page, pass it on to your partner or friends to add their breathing rhythm.

The score is completed when the page is layered with breathing marks.

Massage your forearms back and front. Then slide down your arm as if taking off a glove.

Repeat as many times as you want.

Pause

n.11 card _back

Repeat the vowel sound a-e-i-o-u.

Start by saying each normally and then adjust how much you stretch out the sound or how rapidly you say the vowels.

Decompress

Reflection

n.9 card _back

Make your vowel soundscape

Pause

n.11 card _front

n.12 card _back

n.12 card _front

Reimagining Sleep_Sleep and Parenting

Pause

Decompress

Reflection

https://www.writingsleep.com/reimagining-sleep/sleep-and-parenting/

Toolkit (How to use this cards and how to make your own card)

1.Each card should be performed without distractions.

This deck consists in 12 cards developed by Chiara Dellerba with the purpose of experimenting with concentration, perception,decompression, pausing and reflection as tools to reimagine sleep and gently overcome its disorders.

2.Take time to yourself.

3.Turn off all electronic devices. Find quiet places and don’t set a timer.

4.You might complete these cards consecutively for an intesive and durational experience, or as needed to urge mind and body into a single point of concentration.

5.Use each card to reflect deeply and take notes if you want to see the progression after the completion of all the deck.

6.You will find 1 additional card asking you to apply your imagination and learn to create an instruction personal to you.

7.Take your time to develop your instruction.

8.Submit the instruction through the form on the website or design your own card using the blank template that you can find on the website (card n.2).

Please adjust each card to suit you and your unique set of circumstances.

To visit the exhibition scan the QR code:

A E I

O U

A E I O U A E I O U

A E I

Love Love Love

Love Love Love

Hate Hate Hate

Hate Hate Hate

O U

Sleep and ageing

Over the course of several months, artist and curator Chiara Dellerba investigated how noises from nature - including brown, white, and pink noise - can activate stimuli in our brain to promote wellbeing. This is true especially if such noises are assembled, mixed, and curated to follow specific patterns and compositions.

These stimuli help us reminisce about memories from our past, trigger emotions and perceptions from our present, and imagine scenarios for our future. All these processes can foster states of calmness and decompression.

As a lack of sleep continues to rise amongst ageing populations, substantial evidence shows that spending time with the sounds of nature helps to reduce stress and mental fatigue, and can lead to improved quality of sleep. Academic studies have also demonstrated the potential for music to induce similar results.

Through a series of conversations, mapping deep listening, writing, and mark-making sessions, project participants have actively engaged with these kinds of multisensorial experiences. They have provided visual and written responses to sound stimuli in order to unearth the possibilities of “virtual” nature experiences which might boost sleep and wellbeing.

The Sleep and Ageing collection collates, across these multidisciplinary practices, a series of collaborative meditative poems and creative writings which emerged from deep listening to various sounds from nature.

A digital archive of sounds, developed in collaboration with musician Kamal Joory, is also included in this exhibition. Joory interpreted the creative writings produced in the workshops, translating them into a series of soundscapes for users to explore and discover at their own pace.

As well as browsing through this treasure trove of sounds and words, you can check out the Sleep and Ageing co-production toolkit and add your own written responses to the soundscapes of your choice. Giving your input, you will help build up an open-source library of meditative poems to slow read while deep listening.

All the artworks on display are coproduced by Chiara Dellerba in collaboration with project participants, including Eric, Sara, Martha Sur, Jo Ferenczi, Helen Rice, Sue Allen, Isabel Footring, and Karey Logan. A special thanks to artist Kamal Joory and Paper Crane Poets for their kind collaboration and creative inputs, to Dr Greg Elder for his expert input on the topic of sleep and ageing and to the project Research Assistant, Dr James Rákóczi, for his support throughout.

This online exhibition, curated by Chiara Dellerba, is part of the wider Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement Grant led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro.

Reimagining Sleep_Sleep and Ageing

Toolkit_Expressive Poetry

Toolkit_Expressive Drawing

This collection of 8 poems and 8 soundscapes have been developed by Chiara Dellerba and Kamal Joory with the purpose of using sound and written stimuli as tools for emotional release, reflection and intellectual engagement. The toolkit is an invitation to take your time to pause and allow your imagination to guide you through the creative journey of becoming co-explorers of the complex relation that we have with sleep and its disorders.

Use both the poems and the soundscapes as bases to freely develop your creative response in the form of drawing or poetry. Once you are satisfied with the result, submit it by using the form on the website.

Your responses will become a source of inspiration for the artists to develop further visual and sound content.

1. Find a quiet place where to pause for some time.

1. Take a sheet of A4 or A3 cartridge paper, and a soft pencil (2B, 4B, 6B) or a handwriting pen or a charcoal stick or ink and brush.

https://www.writingsleep.com/reimagining-sleep/sleep-and-ageing/

2. Take a sheet of A4 or A3 cartridge paper, and a soft pencil (2B, 4B, 6B) or a pen.

3. Choose from one of the soundscapes in the library.

4. Listen to the soundscape and start your exploration by letting your writing flow.

Write down whatever comes to mind, focusing on expressing your thoughts and feelings as authentically as possible.

5. Write about what images come to your mind, which landscape you are imagining to be in and what memories are emerging. Write freely without taking your pen off from the paper. Do so until the end of the soundscape you chose.

6. Once finished, read aloud what you have written. Pause. Listen to the soundscape again.

7.Choose between 5-10 sentences that resonate with you the most.

8. Rewrite each sentence on a separate piece of paper.

9. Play with them by creating different sequences of meanings and lines.

10. Once you are satisfied with the composition, listen again to the soundscape to refine your poem.

11. Feel free to change, amend or add more sentences to your poem.

To visit the exhibition scan the QR code:

12. Once you are satisfied with the result, use the form on the website to submit your response.

2. Find a quiet place.

Take your time to listen deeply to one of the soundscapes. Close your eyes and gently start to make a variety of marks in response.

3. Think about how your body is responding to the soundscape. Define the responses of your body by diversifying the marks you make.

4. Experiment with how to respond to a particular sound by using different pressures of the drawing tools on the sheet of paper.

5. Play with speed of movement.

6. Explore possibilities with how you move your fingers, wrist, elbow or shoulder.

7. Let the energy of the sound travel down your arm to the drawing tool.

8. When the soundscape ends, open your eyes. It is time to reflect on: • Which marks do I like?

• Which marks are unexpected/have I never made before?

• When I look at the marks can I remember the sound that inspired me to make them?

9. Once you are satisfied with the result, use the form on the website to submit your response.

Sleep and Menopause

The Sleep and Menopause collection invites you to embark on a meditative journey into the world of plants and medicine and their complex entanglement with menopause and sleep health.

Insomnia is one of the most disruptive sleep disorders associated with menopausal and perimenopausal symptoms. It is characterized by an inability to fall asleep, an inadequate sleep duration, waking up multiple times during the night, or a combination of all of three. For centuries, herbs have been used to treat and manage these sleep difficulties.

The body of work on display here considers what we might learn from plant behaviour that could benefit our own lives as sensitive, complex, and interconnected beings. Additionally, the collection seeks to reframe the extraction, consumption, and use of plants by refocusing our attention onto our deep and holistic relations with them.

Through a creative assortment of data visualisation, creative writing, and reflective practice, the exhibition aims to review and “reimagine” how medicinal plants are investigated experimentally or clinically for sleep disorders. It also explores the plants’ possible mechanisms of action and active components.

The fragmented and multisensory mapping underpinning this work is also supported by the Sleep and Menopause coproduction toolkit which you can use to contribute to the exhibition. Our goal is to open further conversations on how plants can be essential allies in the ways we rest and reset our body as well as in how we might learn to pause, reflect, and listen to our body when it is enduring the pressures of lack of sleep and hormonal change.

All the artworks on display are coproduced by Chiara Dellerba in collaboration with project participants, including Ikuko Tsuchiya, Lucy Jane Murphy and Suzanne . A special thanks to Prof Jason Ellis for his expert input on the topic of sleep and the menopause and to the project Research Assistant, Dr James Rákóczi, for his support throughout.

This online exhibition, curated by Chiara Dellerba, is part of the wider Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement Grant led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro.

Reimagining Sleep_Sleep and Menopause

https://www.writingsleep.com/reimagining-sleep/sleep-and-menopause/

This collection of 4 infographic maps seeks to guide through a sensory journey and alternative interacton with 4 plants: Passion Flower, Valerian, Lavender and Ashwagandha.

These plants are known for their positive impact in helping women facing menopausal symtomps and in supporting them to overcome sleep disorders due to ormonal changes.

Each map, by gently mixing folkloric, scientifc and personal information, invites you to reflect, learn and engage with the more-than-human world.

Through 7 questions, the toolkit invites you to use your senses to gently explore, learn and experience how we can rethink our relationship with these plants and their impacts on our well-being.

Toolkit_Organoleptic Tea Tasting 1. Choose one of the plants between: Valerian (Roots), Passion Flower (Leaves), Lavender (Flower), Ashwagandha.

2. Make a herbal tea, using the plant of your choice. Find a quiet space where to drink the tea.

3. Use a sheet of paper and a pen to map your sensorial journey.

4. Close your eyes and gently smell the tea.

Take your time to engage deeply with the nuances of its smell. How would you describe the smell in 3 words? What does the smell reminds you of? Does it bring up any memories?

5. When you take a sip, does it have a texture or a ‘feel’ in your mouth?

Where does it sit in your palate?

6. How would you describe the taste in 3 words?

7. Does it feel like it’s moving in a particular direction in your body?

8. Who do you think this would be good for?

9. Close your eyes and breathe. Feel free to repeat the process above as many times as you’d like and in different times of the day. Keep recording your thoughts and make notes. Keep using this time to pause, reflect and engage with the more-than-human world.

10. Once you are satisfied with the result, use the form on the website to submit your responses to the questions.

To visit the exhibition scan the QR code:

All the artworks on display are co-produced by Chiara Dellerba in collaboration with project participants. A special thanks to artist Kamal Joory and Paper Crane Poets for their kind collaboration and creative inputs.

This online exhibition, curated by Chiara Dellerba, is part of the wider Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement Grant led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro.

Hosted by Northumbria University, the Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project consists in a collaboration between Dr De Cristofaro, who is the project’s Principal Investigator, the team at the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research directed

by Prof Jason Ellis, The Sleep Charity, and artist Chiara Dellerba. Special thanks to Prof Jason Ellis, Vicki Beevers, Lisa Artis, Dr Pam Alfonso-Miller, and Dr Greg Elder for their expert input and to the project Research Assistant, Dr James Rákóczi, for his support throughout.

These works are licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Graphic Design: Chiara Dellerba

https://www.writingsleep.com/reimagining-sleep/online-exhibition/ or scan the QR code below: