Wellington artist Bailee Lobb has had a "combative" relationship with sleep her whole life.
In the upcoming performance-installation How do you sleep at night? at Nelson Arts Festival she'll use a range of "non-pharmaceutical sleep aids" to try and nod off at a Nelson gallery.
Bailee Lobb sitting inside her Jellybean inflatable Photo: Sarah Jamieson
Bailee tells Culture 101 that, to give herself the best sleep experience possible, she'll have on hand an array of sensory and physical objects on hand, including earplugs, an eye mask, 100% cotton sheets, a memory foam mattress, a beaded weighted blanket and soft comforting sculptures that mirror the shape of her body.
"During the performance, I'll be moving through the gallery to collect these pieces and create an ideal sleeping nook for myself, and then attempting to go to sleep in the gallery."
Sensory Self-Portraits is on at Nelson's Refinery ArtSpace gallery from 19 to 28 October.
Bailee lives with fibromyalgia and autism and says she's had a "combative" relationship with sleep her whole life.
The sensory tools that she finds personally helpful tend to appear in her artwork.
"Often when I make an artwork I've been thinking about these ideas in my personal life for a long time and at some point, I start thinking about the furthest I could push that piece to make the optimal situation. That's where it starts to go into the territory of artwork.
"It's unlikely that I'm ever going to get to the point where I have a bed that has a hole carved into it for my shoulder but in the gallery context, I can do that. I can really experiment in a way that's kind of like the furthest, most optimal iteration of what sleep support looks like."
Part of the "nightly routine" Bailee will run through in the performance will involve getting rid of any excess energy in her body and then selecting the objects that she needs to relax for sleep.
Sensory Self-Portraits also includes soothing sensory "bubbles" from Bailee's 2021 textile installation In Bathing, Bask.
These large inflatable bubble forms – which visitors can unzip and enter – were created in response to years of missing colour while living in flats, Bailee says.
They provide a space where people can regulate their nervous systems and get a break from the outside world.
"Fans inside give kind of a bit of white noise but it's quite gentle. And because there's no divide between the floor, the walls and the ceiling, the space kind of becomes quiet. It's quite all-encompassing and it feels like you're just in the colour."
Having grown up in a "really colorful" family, with a mum who's an interior designer, colour is very important to Bailee's art practice.
"I'm very deliberate about the colours that I use, I do a lot of testing because all of my works are hand-dyed so there's a lot of testing to get the right colour.
"A huge part of the experiment is about people considering and working out how they respond to colour personally because I don't think we do a very good job of using colour in our personal spaces and it's so good for us to use colour. It can do really wonderful things for our lives if we use it in our own environments. That's really the conversation that these works are hoping to kind of start. People may say 'That yellow work made me feel really good. Maybe I should incorporate more yellow into my home'."
'Pineapple Place' inflatable in 2021 at Toi Poneke, Wellington Photo: Cheska Brown
As an artist and gallery visitor, touch is also "super important".
"I am a sneaky person in galleries who will touch things that I'm not supposed to. It comes down to, for me, bridging a gap of understanding. I struggle to understand works of art when I can't understand the materiality of them, I'm very materially driven ... So all of the work in the show is touchable. I don't actually think I've made anything ever that wasn't touchable."
In addition to working as an artist, Bailee provides professional advice on creating sensory-friendly areas in workplaces and exhibitions.
She says engaging with artwork physically makes it a multi-sensory, and therefore richer, experience.
"I always think kids do it right. When you see kids go into a gallery, they tear around, they look at the things they're allowed to look at and not touch, and then they immediately go inside my work ... We are used to touching textiles every day, there's not a single day that goes by where we don't touch textiles."
Sensory Self Portraits is on at Nelson's Refinery Artspace from 19 to 28 October. In Bathing, Bask has been exhibited in Te Atamira (Queenstown), the Toi Pōneke Arts Centre (Wellington), Te Tuhi (Auckland), and the Granville Centre Art Gallery in Australia.
