Land doesn’t simply support life, it becomes its own dreaming body.
We first began thinking about Fertile Dreams in the summer of 2025. The world felt charged by conflict and instability, and we found ourselves searching for languages of renewal. Surrealism and automatism offered a point of departure: ways of working that trust intuition, that allow thought to surface from beneath rational control. We were interested in how artists return to nature, to repetition, to dream states, as rituals of recalibration.
A single idea took root: fertility. First taken as a metaphor, it expanded into a way of thinking through exhibition. Fertility as imagination. Fertility as regeneration. Fertility as artistic dialogue. Our curatorial question gradually bloomed into a conversation between women artists working across different geographies, generations and materials. Over time, the exhibition grew beyond its original contours. New works entered. Site-specific commissions materialised.
Fertile Dreams exists in the slippages between soil and psyche, where earthly terrain fuels the landscape of the unconscious. Fertility here extends beyond biology. It signals sustenance, origin, return. It speaks to cycles of growth and erosion, presence and absence, ignition and renewal.
Within this terrain, bodies appear as shifting topographies. A line becomes a riverbed. A curve suggests enclosure or emergence. Gestural repetition gathers force through rhythm. Some artists reduce form to its essentials; others draw on mythic and spiritual vocabularies grounded in land and inherited memory. Across painting, fresco, charcoal and natural pigment, material itself becomes a carrier of time.
As the exhibition has moved through its cycle, connections have surfaced more insistently. Echoes of fruit and root in one space find resonance in vegetal abstraction elsewhere. Now in its final iteration, we encounter a swirling pastel atmospheres that speak to earthen surfaces and ritual mark-making. Practices separated by discipline align through shared concerns with origin, interiority and transformation.
