The Mad Hatter of the contemporary Canadian graphic arts, wood engraver George A. Walker considers the passage of time as it unfolds from the pages of his personal dream diary.
The Mad Hatter of contemporary Canadian graphic arts, wood engraver George A. Walker considers the passage of time as it unfolds from the binding of his personal dream diary.
Walker was introduced to the concept of a visual dream diary in John MacGregor’s ‘Inscape Psychology’ courses at the Ontario College of Art in the 1980s. An essential part of the course requirement insisted each student keep a daily dream diary. The methodology was simple enough: set an alarm clock with an urgent mechanism in the evening primed to startle the dreaming student to sudden wakefulness in the morning, then set to paper immediately whatever fragments could be salvaged from a fitful night before the fanciful thoughts dissipated in the bright glare of dawn. Walker became obsessed with the practice and continues to record his dreams daily, twenty-five years further on. Often in the nineteenth-century medium of wood engraving, pushing sharpened burins into the planed surface of endgrain Canadian maple.