Scientists know that DREAM INCUBATION is easily possible when some simple techniques are used. Content, main characters or objects of a dream can be provoked by many things –scrolling through social media, a hard day at work, or a children book illustration that suddenly pops up in our memories just seconds before we fall asleep. But what happens in a dream is a whole new surprise of unrelated, sometimes abstract and unbelievable combinations of actions and things that are impossible to think of in a waking, material world. And there’s also such a thing as Daydreaming, which is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction... Ruska Badriashvili knows all this pretty well. She’s a MA of Social Psychiatry and Patara Gallery is presenting her first ever solo show.

Her drawings made with ink pen on paper and then arranged as collages in a computer, are results of dreams and daydream. These drawings are built around one dream-like story, telling us about the wanderer with manners and symbols that we think we’ve already seen, this story we think we’ve heard already or the aesthetic that reminds us eastern fairy-tales or sometimes even our dreams.

Ruska says: “studying psyche is my job but also my hobby. Each drawing from THOUSAND SECRETS is my thought expressed out aloud to myself or other seekers. I don’t work in routine: sometimes I suddenly wake up, sometimes I just don’t go to sleep and draw my emotions that are alive in the moment. All symbols and objects are fruit of my imagination, I try not to repeat any existing pattern and draw any detail by myself.

I’ve been working on these series for two and a half year and still they are not finished yet. These drawings are projecting thoughts and questions of every explorer, emotions, choices, discoveries, plans. Some images come from my dreams, some are archetypical.

With these drawings I try to connect conscious, unconscious, and higher consciousness. This is my try to reflect the world, its illusions/delusions; understand who I am, where am I standing and what role mySelf is playing in inner and outer realities. Drawings are often a code that helps me find a solution to a personal problem. Same as dream-reading and interpretation, my drawings help me understand myself. That’s why the drawing process is so personal, so intimate for me.

Mirror and glass are both reflecting materials. Both for me represent a unifying concept: one is many and many in one...”

THOUSAND SECRETS is Ruska’s self- analysing process, the product of which- her drawings, - we are observing as if we are digging in her dreams.

All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and PATARA gallery