Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming is an installation of drawings printed on unique silk satin banners. It explores the idea that drawing is a form of Lucid Dreaming, between dream and self-consciousness, annotating, mapping, digesting and developing thoughts of the imagination in real time as they happen within the mind, by using mark making, diagrams, borrowed and made up symbols, geometric and organic structures and anatomies. Each drawing takes off from a snippet of text on a bookpage where theory, fiction, or language account for a peculiar experience of consciousness: daydreaming, remembrance, fantasy and drowsiness. Each drawing grows digitally over the page, digesting its content, covering it all up and growing independently from it into an autonomous structure, a visual thought, and a threshold to the subconscious. These initial digital drawings become printed on paper and develop through further layers of analogue drawing using mixed media on paper. They then become re-digitised and sometime follow several iterations of this process, over several years, until becoming here printed on silk as their final form. However, each could continue morphing and variating into a new drawing, shifting between digital and analogue all over again in the future, just like ideas and imagery transform in our mind

Drawing is a key practice underscoring the whole of Maria Teresa’s artwork, which articulates into, both permanent and intangible, forms of interdisciplinary research collaborations, exhibitions, site-specific installations, public commissions, engagement and education work. Traversing science, data and psychology, her work also uses hybrid processes between technology and hand-made, from drawings of the flux of imagination, to data sculptures of brainwaves capturing intimate states of mind and emotion.

Maria Teresa Ortoleva is a London-based Italian artist and a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art. She is represented in Milan by Luca Tommasi gallery, and she is currently funded by UKRI as a PhD researcher in data sculpture/physicalization, in the Human-Centred Computing group at King’s College London. She has had solo exhibitions at Luca Tommasi Gallery (Milano, 2025, 2018) and Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro (Milano, 2016), as well as several group exhibitions between Italy and the UK. Selected public and site-specific commissions include: Cittadella degli Archivi (Milano Civic Archive) sculpture garden (Milano, 2025); UCL Public Art, Trellis Arbor artist for UCL’s new Institute of Neurology/Dementia Research Institute (London, 2023-25); 22 Bishopsgate (London, 2022); Bocconi Art Gallery, for Bocconi University (Milano 2021); Contexto Edolo, curated by Casa Testori (Milano, 2018); ExpoMilano, stairs of honour of Università Cattolica (Milano, 2015).

Tannery Projects

This display is a part of Tannery Arts’ occasional exhibition and events programme run by and for Tannery Artists. Tannery Projects aims to encourage new discourse between Tannery Artists and engagement with London contemporary art, through excellence and innovation.