Lynda Draper: No Sheep in the Meadow

By Naomi Riddle

A week of sleepless nights gave Naomi Riddle unexpected insights into the strangely familiar work of Lynda Draper — work that seems to somehow exist at the threshold of daylight and dreams.

01

A confession: the week before writing this essay, I began to have trouble sleeping. Every night I would stare at the ceiling, listening to the cars passing outside the bedroom window, cataloguing the difference in sound between a four-wheel drive, a sedan, a truck, a bigger truck, and the recycling pickup, which sometimes arrived before five thirty am.

Now I can tell the time of night by the pace of the traffic. If a car goes past at three am, I want to know where it’s been or where it’s going. Sometimes a person will start talking by the curb, or a front door will slam, or there’ll be a shout, then a laugh. Someone who lives on my street goes to work between the hours of four and five am. Two nights in a row, a siren sounds, but only briefly, as if the driver has changed their mind and decided it isn’t an emergency after all.

One morning I open the blind, and a pair of sunglasses has been left, perched, on top of the railings.

“A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding. The gap left by things which have already happened. Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do. But that.” - Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes (2012)

Lynda Draper Midnight, 2021 Ceramic, various glazes 90 x 50 x 50 cm Photo credit: Docqment

02

When I spoke to Lynda, she told me that she often wakes in the early hours, that sometimes she goes for long walks, in the bush, or along the ridgeline near her home. But Lynda’s waking hours are different from my waking hours, which are just a crotchety inability to relax. Hers are gentle and still. Far from being buffeted by the noise of a lorry or a passer-by, Lynda finds herself ambling amongst the branches of trees. No people, no noise, just a trunk or a garden bed or a possum, each with their own shape and shadow.

We have all sensed how the outline of a thing can change when it is cloaked in darkness. A hedge will be all the more present and mysterious when it is only lit by the light of the moon (Is that a figure? A streetlight? A ghost?). Night, then, for Lynda, is not a time of not sleeping, but a time for wandering and making. It is a time of solitude and reflection, of rolling, pinching, and building structures in clay.

“Day doesn’t fall: night does. Light is slick and fluid, darkness is heavy and can grow heavier,” writes Anne Boyer, in The Fall of Night. “Everything we know about the night inspires catalogues but defies dissection, for the night, despite how it gets thick, brings no body. Night has no anatomy, just inventory. Night contains.” The works that make up Flowers in the night can only be thought of as sculptures made by night—inspired by the forms in the darkness—even if you are viewing them by the light of day.

When I first saw Lynda’s sculptures, I instinctively thought of them as crowns, but, having looked at them more closely, now I think of them as traps, or interlocking branches, or roots, or hallways, or webs. They can wink at you sideways, or be alluring, or make you feel uneasy. What all these traits have in common is that they are bridges between states—they are gateways to somewhere real and imagined, somewhere enticing and frightening, somewhere strange and familiar. Lynda is fashioning clay in the same way our brain pulls threads out of our unconscious as we dream, or the way Scheherazade spins out words so as to be able to keep the story going, so as to be able to make it through another night.

Lynda Draper Dracaena, 2021 Ceramic, various glazes 115 x 70 x 70 cm Photo credit: Docqment

03

Is Lynda awake or dreaming when she is making? A tricky question to answer, and I would equivocate and say yes and no. In the same way that a lucid dreamer knows when they have slipped inside a dream and can walk around its rooms, so does Lynda give herself over to intuition and rhythm and the shape of the clay. She is exploring what Malcom Godwin describes as the ‘threshold between dreams and awakening, that twilight area where illusion, imagination, and reality meet’, the place where we discover the ‘dream and visionary states which allow us glimpses of the real world.’

But I also like to think of Lynda’s sculptures as mementos to the types of assignations or moments that always happen in an in-between time. With her predawn reverie, Lynda is attending to the hours when many of us might still be up or just waking, those of us who live in an upside down world where night shadows make their presence known: mothers of newborns, nurses, shift workers, uber drivers, bartenders, lovers, plotters and tricksters.

Lynda Draper Moon song, 2020 Ceramic, various glazes 94 x 50 x 50 cm Photo credit: Docqment

04

Another confession: I wrote most of these words while my head was resting on the pillow. I wrote most of these words by thinking of them as strings, while also trying to will myself to go to sleep, getting annoyed at the way the sentences kept circling around and repeating themselves, so I couldn’t go to sleep after all. Also, I was trying to make sure I wouldn’t forget the sentences, trying to be careful to snatch them up, because I know and Lynda knows that it is during the tricky half-state between waking and sleeping that those things vanish, and that phrases or images that feel crucial to remember at midnight can seem strange and unnecessary by morning. Make a note to find that book with a paragraph about the author who could only write between the hours of four and six am. Become convinced I read it in Moyra Davey’s Index Cards but can’t find mention of it anywhere. Think about this with my head on the pillow. Think about how it is either one am, or two am, but choose to avoid looking at the clock. Think about Lynda in her studio, or out walking, or quietly pressing her hands into clay. Think about Lynda’s work, silent in the gallery, awake too.

Exhibition: Flowers of the Night, July 15 - 31, 2021

Lynda Draper in her Thirroul studio Photo credit: Docqment