The Sound of You Dreaming
A solo exhibition by Paul Scerri
Spazju Kreattiv, St James Cavalier, 17 January - 9 March 2025
Dreams are a rupture in the process of understanding the world because they contradict everyday notions of time and space, but at the same time they also contain strange and deep truths, both personal and collective. Paul Scerri works through these ideas in The Sound of You Dreaming. He has plunged into a research process that has drawn him inwards and taken him backwards in time, back to his native home island of Gozo, to his grandparents’ abandoned house, and to memories of his forbearers, from which he collects fragments that make their way into his work in oblique ways. Scerri’s stylised visual language poeticises the contradictions that guide the unfolding of human relationships, rendering them in an artistic language born from over 40 years of working with ceramic.
Paul Scerri, Lost in a Labyrinth (2022) stoneware, glazes and metals
Dreams are a break in the process of understanding the world because they contradict everyday notions of time and space, but, at the same time, they also contain strange and deep truths, both personal and collective.
Paul Scerri works through these ideas in The Sound of You Dreaming. His stylised visual language, born from over 40 years of working with ceramic, turns the contradictions within human relationships into something poetic and meaningful. His evocative and alchemical sculptures find parallels with the technique of dreaming, both in terms of what they say and how they say it.
In one way or another, Scerri has always incorporated his experience into his work, but within the collection for The Sound of You Dreaming, his history, and that of those around him, is invoked in new and innovative ways. He has plunged into a research process that has drawn him inwards and taken him backwards in time, back to his native home island of Gozo, to his grandparents’ abandoned house, and to memories of
his forbearers, from which he collects fragments that make their way into his work in oblique ways.
To hear the sound of another’s dreams means to enter a shared space and, as Margret Atwood puts it, to allow “the smooth dark wave” of sleep to engulf you. The title of the exhibition alludes to a wish: the desire to enter a shared darkness and cross the unbridgeable gulf between one person and another; the desire to get into someone else’s deepest thoughts and approach their secret center; the desire to know, and in turn be known.
Art surges forward to fill the gap that opens up when we reach the limits of our ability to understand the world, and each other. In Scerri’s sculptures, the alchemical process that begins with earth turning into fire-hardened ceramic undergoes apotheosis into an imaginative space where it becomes possible to circumscribe things that are known but are inexpressible.
Curation and text Gabriel Zammit; Associate curation Andrew Borg Wirth; Exhibition design Tracey Sammit; Sound design Matyou Galea, voice by Kris Polidano; Light design Light Design Solutions; Catalogue text Konrad Buhagiar and Maria Theuma, poetry by Kris Polidano; Graphic design Siobhan Vassallo; Special thanks Norbert Francis Attard, Daniel Azzopardi, Stephen Azzopardi, Rachael Blackburn, Leanne Bugeja, Lydia Busietta, Nick Cachia, Marcel Cassar, Peter Cutajar, Liana DeBattista, Jeannette Fiott, Maria Eileen Fsadni, Joe Gatt, Alison Satariano, Silvana Scerri, Thomas Scerri, Keith Scicluna, Spazju Kreattiv Staff, Jeremy Vassallo, Sam Vassallo, Loranne Vella, Benjamin Zammit
The Sound of You Dreaming is part of the Spazju Kreattiv Programme 2024/2025.
Funded by Arts Council Malta Support Scheme
Supported by Light Design Solutions, Interior Outfitters, Valletta Contemporary Gallery, APS Bank, SAW Ltd.