Tirahvaalta is a concept that I am making art around continuously alongside my other art- it is an imaginary country. I first came across this idea when I was looking for interesting collages and stumbled across a blog called the Recollection Parlor. Sadly, no one has updated it since 2009, but I found the art and the concept fascinating.

Basically, a group of artists got together and were creating their own countries via imagined ephemera like postage stamps, currency, postcards, etc. (as an aside, these folks must surely be Nick Bantock fans) I found the work and the idea behind it very creative, so naturally my mind wanted to run with it even further. I set out to design my own country,  and named it Tirahvaalta. It became a large , whimsical place with different regional aspects and several distinct cities.

Tirahvaalta is still growing and forming slowly.  I have pages of notes on its  strange inhabitants and features that have yet to see any eyes but mine. It’s  definitely a creative escape for me, but sometimes it’s also an actual escape. It’s a place with no restrictions, a dreamlike world where the problems that exist in my everyday reality are mere reflections, and are often made ridiculous. I wanted to create a place where magic existed and thrived, where the impossible was normal, where both silly and somber could coexist unfettered, and where part of my mind could take a “vacation”.

It’s certainly a repository for my imagination. I was very actively imaginative as a child, and to some degree I feel mundane reality has attempted, as it does to many, to beat this skill out of me. I have a harder time getting my mind to be creative in a positive way in the exterior world where I more often feel there are too many limits binding me. My inner world has always been richer, and giving it a name and a space to thrive makes it more real, more accessible, and more of a tool to change and affect my outer world.

In thinking about Tirahvaalta, and building it, I’ve realized one of my overreaching goals as an artist was to take the imagery that one only sees in dreams, and smuggle it over the border of consciousness. So many times when I was young, I tried to do this, literally. There would be a toy, or game that I would hold on to and try to bring along with as I was waking up. Or I would draw or write down something within a dream that I wanted to remember, and bring with me. Obviously, I never physically was able to do that, no matter how many times I tried. I never really stopped trying though.

My dreams and my inner world has always, to me anyway, been a more colorful, less restricted version of waking reality that has been easy to recall or conjure up. I’ve often felt sad for others who couldn’t remember their dreams, or had ones that too closely resembled being awake because I felt they were missing out. Dreams are the last truly unexplored countries- they have no size, no boundaries, less rules and more wonder. Everything is always changing.

While I recognize many of my dreams to be related to certain processes of my psyche and my emotional/mental/physical states, there is still enough strangeness about them to not make them just another mechanical process in my human machinery. Understanding their language better has not diminished the magic; on the contrary it has changed it and made it dreams easier to “use”.  It has been like wandering through a foreign place and suddenly discovering a guidebook.

Tirahvaalta reflects both the parts of my psyche that are more enduring- in the personality of the cities- and the more ephemeral- in the changing array of characters and stories that can move between places within the country. A lot of the notes and stories I have written down are like dreams in length and content- vignettes of odd situations that don’t necessarily connect by an  overarching plot. They are more like pieces of a puzzle that can’t decide on what shape to make, and is not one to ever come to completion. I’ve struggled with how to put such an chimeric, shifting world into a more tangible form, and trust me, it’s not easy. There are some images from dreams that do not translate over into our waking visual language,  and occasionally  an approximation can actually ruin a concept more than describe it. That said however, I still believe the effort is  worth it.

I initially was trying to figure out what format would be best to capture Tirahvaalta, and part of me still thinks that some sort of book, however disjointed it may end up, is a plausible medium.  I had started a blog, the links for which I have since taken down, as a straight forward written format is not my forte, but also not conducive to the flow of the place. It was taking too linear a path, and dreams are not really linear. This is not to say a blog wouldn’t work to explain Tirahvaalta,  but the way I had begun it was not achieving what I had really wanted. My troubles in getting Tirahvaalta off the ground, in whatever form, have been in trying to induct my audience into the realm. I kept approaching it from the angle of someone who enters through unusual means; a dreamlike, rare occurrence that happens in the physical world that suddenly takes the person through the barrier to this other-wordly place.

The entrance being somewhat of a puzzle, I decided to continue to work on the country itself, and let the door inward work itself out for a bit. I have entertaining the idea of expressing it in an assemblage piece, as dreams leave behind tokens and symbols typically more often than full explanations. The idea of found objects, or collected souvenirs from a trip seems to be a better way to approach the disjointed yet connected feeling of a dream like place. Instead of being told from in linear fashion from a fixed point of focus, as in a person speaking or writing, the mind has to put together the story from seemingly unrelated objects that all have a greater connection or framework encompassing them. This is far closer to how dreams actually behave.

The concept of faux ephemera appeals to me for the purpose of my Tirahvaalta project. Ephemera by definition describes the trinkets found in dreams as well as dreams themselves; transient objects that were meant to be used and discarded, that weren’t meant to last but by either accident or intent are remembered and collected. My love affair with public domain imagery and paper ephemera like tickets, cards, letters, etc. has only fostered this idea further by giving me a concrete set of objects that can be put together to describe something more amorphous. How often does one wake up with only an object/person or two remembered from a dream? More often than not. Even if you are someone like me who remembers the majority of your dreams, if you don’t write them down right away (and even if you do), you tend to pick out only the most important details like a souvenir because the real message and emotion of the dream is attached to these.

I’ve read that the brain remembers things in chunks, and certain emotions are tied to these chunks, perhaps to make them easier to call up. If we look at our collecting of ephemera and souvenirs the same way, then we are creating external memories of a place or event, or person. Looking at a shell from a beach can call up an entire memory of a summer, or a specific day, or at the very least, as details fade, the feelings of that day. In this sense, the ephemera we keep is a symbol or a key to what we want to remember of a transient time. Since our only time is the present, these tokens are our sole passage back. Whether you are speaking of a dream, or a trip, or a time in your life, this idea holds true. Humans, by nature, collect and acquire objects to be a means to travel through time and space to places other than then present.  This is why people make photo albums, or scrapbooks, and hold onto precious nick-nacks. Our minds can hold a great deal of info, but apparently we sometimes need scraps and letters or trinkets to remind us of what is lurking in the dark reaches of the mental library stacks.

My aim is to use this idea behind ephemera to describe an intangible place. A place where one can acquire tokens from ones past visits, but possibly the future also. Tirahvaalta is a place that is not going to stop growing, and could very well be the one cohesive theme that ties all my work together. I’ve sometimes lamented that my work seems a little unfocused or ADD when you look at it all in a group, but the more I notice the symbols I repeat through my pieces, the more I realize I need to reframe my own vision of my work. Every piece fits has its own context is a much bigger picture. this is not to say that specific pieces don’t have their own microcosm and message, but the more I step back I notice that each one is the limb of a much bigger creature than I had previously imagined.

Tirahvaalta has certainly not all been explained in this post. I’ve only scratched the surface of the concepts behind it. In my next post, I will attempt to introduce the visual aspects of my country and uncover some art that has previously been lurking unseen.

My aim is to  write  something every week or so, when I have a piece or idea that should be given some attention. I am however, a procrastinator and somewhat (ok, very) distractible in my work process. The constant balance between mundane priorities often clashes with the multitude of half-started projects, my desire to just watch Dr. Who ad nauseum, and various other sundry activities like being lazy (which I need to work harder at).

You may be wondering why I have trouble talking about my art?

To begin with, I know that whatever I say and whatever I put into a piece will not necessarily be the exact things that come to ones mind when viewing it. I’ve learned enough about symbolism to know that certain objects and images will affect people different based on their own perspective and experiences. This should not be a cop-out on my end, of course, because the original intent and feeling should be taken into account and may even change what the viewer gets out of my work. I do know that an observer will always see some reflection of themselves in art, whether or not they realize it. As such, a work of art isn’t going to mean the same thing or have a similar effect on everyone.

As I noted before, I often have trouble freely expressing myself. As an artist, this is troublesome not only in terms of speaking, but in terms of being true to oneself. It makes it that much harder for ideas to come through, and to even technically execute a piece. I unfortunately learned early on that despite the chanted mantra of “be yourself”, truly being yourself only seemed ok if you were doing something “others” approved of.  Suffice it to say that inconsistency and mixed messages made me wary of expressing what I wanted and needed to. This is still a struggle for me today.

I am often quiet about my art and my inner clock-work of thoughts and feelings because somewhere along the way, I felt that what I was holding in wasn’t really that important to say, or no one really wanted to hear it anyhow.  That if I opened the bottle and let it out, it would  cause more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps I would be called a fraud, or be ridiculed. I have the tendency to not say much because I often don’t feel like I have anything worth saying.

This sort of thinking is the slow asphyxiation of expression. My intent here is to give my thoughts some air, and do so whether anyone gives a fuck or not. There’s no sense in having a voice, especially an artistic one, if it is not being put to use.

So, this blog is about therapy. This blog is about art. This blog is about whatever the fuck I feel like writing about with those two concepts in mind. Uncensored, likely with colorful language now and again. Maybe sometimes overly formal, which is how I get when I’m not quite sure how to just cut loose and write. Mostly, it’s about expression, in all forms, and my analysis of how I do that (or don’t).

Welcome.