Pushing the Rational – Using dreamwork as a method for art and feminist resistance

Yngström, Frida and Wilson, Mark and Williams, Robert (2026) Pushing the Rational – Using dreamwork as a method for art and feminist resistance. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

The project combines dreaming as a process of externalising and sharing unconscious processes with the use of feminist strategies to inform problem solving within an art practice. This, it is argued, opens a spectrum of possibilities for a collective artistic process through the method of dreamwork. Dreamwork here is defined as a Jungian-influenced group-based practice. The project potentially offers new rooms for utilising dreams in the waken state. The art projects of Pushing the Rational shape hybrid models based on three main components: dreamwork, artistic practice based on the every day, and feminist strategies. The practice fields of dreamwork, artistic mark-making, and feminist activism are essentially different, the development of a temporal language involving parts of these three areas makes up a process model. The project Pushing the Rational, provides examples of how artists engaging in dreamwork-based processes can share part of each other’s artistic development in order to reveal different levels of collaborative practices—in processes, materiality, and content. The analysis connects the work theoretically to feminist resistance, where a small workgroup relies on shared experiences of everyday life. Personally experienced dreams are explored in the collective processes within the project. The project development is based on feminist anti-hierarchical thought. In joining C.G. Jung’s concept of the unconscious and its creative strength with feminist strategies in artistic research in the form of new collaborative models and tools. In the eight projects, there are three different process-models for methodbuilding collaborative artistic work. These models here employ the hybrid temporal language of the four group constellations’ process material of using respective collaborating artists’ situated knowledge of the artistic process, artistic material and everyday life experience together with the practice of dreamwork. The process collaboration models can be seen as social models, as well as work models, for artists when working collaboratively or sharing the artistic process in order to develop individual practice with the support of artist colleagues.