Maiko Kikuchi

Waking Dreams

The unconscious is the wellspring of art. Ideas, some fully formed and some tantalizingly amorphous, bubble up from the dark ocean in our minds, all the time. It takes the artistic temperament to recognize, hone, and express the ones that cry out for it the most.

Dreams, perhaps the purest utterances of unconscious thought, have long been gifts to artists. From Renaissance stalwarts such as Raphael to 19th-century visionaries such as William Blake; surrealist mainstays such as Magritte to contemporary masters such as James Turrell, the fertile ground of the dreamscape has been a constant renewable resource for the creative act.

But what about daydreams? That sunlight cousin to the nightly dream, the daydream is equally capable of offering us jolts of inspiration, staggering us with unexpected juxtapositions, and equipping us with the tools to say what our unconscious is compelling us to say. The filmmaker David Lynch has long been proselytizing about the enormous potential daydreaming has for informing art. He has described it as a place where “all the thoughts just flow.”

But there is an essential difference between the daydream and the sleeping dream: One can be controlled and directed, at least to some degree, by the conscious mind, while the other holds us in its thrall and takes us wherever the id wishes to go. We can get lost inside a reverie, but we always have the power to change its course, adjust its focus, or hasten its pace. In this hybrid space between wakefulness and sleep, the artist might find incredible opportunities to enhance their work.

Maiko Kikuchi is an artist who has made harnessing her daydreams a central element of her practice. Her unique upbringing as the daughter of a practicing psychoanalyst in Japan gave her a deep and embedded understanding of the value of daydreaming, and her work—from paintings to collages to puppet-making to performance—relies on her ability to navigate and interpret the riddles offered to her by daydreams. By embracing dream logic and the twists of representation and narrative gifted to the artist by her subconscious, Kikuchi presents her audience with heavily personal art that’s riddled with archetypal imagery and moments. To briefly live inside her daydreams doesn’t only give us insight into her mind—it also invites us to look more closely at our own.