Nukkumatti
30 x 21 cm | 12 x 8 in
2025
This work stages Sandman as an exhausted and compromised figure, suspended between ritual and collapse. The image is built through dense monochrome shadows, with a central body emerging only partially from darkness, as if the figure is forming and dissolving at once. This instability gives the work a dreamlike quality, where reflection, obscurity, and fragmentation become part of its visual language. Rather than appearing as an omnipotent ruler of sleep, Sandman is shown as a worn intermediary, burdened by the projections and urgencies of human consciousness. The ritual of dressing, the glint of ornament, and the surrounding murk suggest a figure caught in performance, yet already eroded by the force it is meant to govern. In this sense, the work reflects on dreams as a neutral but deeply personal terrain, shaped by individual experience, where desire, nightmare, and memory continuously overlap. It becomes a meditation on surrender and resistance, on the wish for rest, and on the impossibility of escaping the minds that repeatedly call the figure back into service.
Sandman, the master of dreams, is standing in front of a dirty mirror, delicately putting on an earring in candlelight after getting changed. Wearing an exaggeratedly decorated uniform that shines so bright with gold, platinum and jewels, the epitome of human power, they appeared tarnished through the reflection in the mirror. The ritual is about to begin to transcend his body of eyes, the embodiment of humanity, its imaginations and speculations away to their eternal resting place. Being manipulated many a times, it calls to serve, yet unable to rest. It cannot control what comes to the heads of humans, no matter how random it seems. This work is the time when Sandman can confront its masters inside him to leave it alone and so it can also take a break. It can finally rest - eternally. With a little inspiration from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, I am re-thinking the dream state as often the sentient beings' summons, as well as its active and uninvited 'invasion' into our minds sometimes when situations become urgent. Personal interaction with my sleep fantasies also seem to occur to me that individual experience did hugely influence what the contents of the dream-state will be, with a few often lingering to become visuals for my works of art - will some extrapolation. Dreams (and nightmares) are interesting in a way; that they are actually bent towards the personality of the individual, with a balance of good and bad dreams, proving that dreams is neutral in its own; it is the sentience that provide the spice.
