Sleepwalker: A Journey of Forking Paths

Sleepwalking has long been a tangled mystery — spirit possession, ancestral communication, encounters with unseen forces that deepen a person's sense of the world beyond waking life. You don't need to physically walk in your sleep to experience that journey. In dreams, we can travel forward and backward in time, inhabit impossible realities, see events from angles unavailable while awake. We spend a third of our lives asleep — and a good portion of that dreaming. What we discover there can educate us, warn us, tease us. Dreaming opens our sleeping eyes to other possibilities.

Sleepwalker is not about somnambulism. It's about that nightly journey through the dream world — and the countless paths that exist within it, all at once.

The figure is frozen in time, leaning forward through a hoop as it gazes into the next realm. The extended hands each hold an antler or a branch — a forking path where one option becomes several. It's a visual echo of Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths," a labyrinth of choices diverge, each one splitting into more, all possibilities existing simultaneously. The hoop reads as the threshold of curiosity through which our imagination is released.

The color of the body tells the same story in a different register. From the feet to the hips, the figure is a semi-translucent, ghostly white — grounded, still tethered to the waking body. Above the hips, the surface darkens into clouds and night sky, the color of the mind and mystery. The face is flattened to simple two-dimensional planes, the eyes cut through as open apertures. It’s a mask for our consciousness.

My interest in this topic is nothing new. Before focusing on Visual Communication as a career I seriously considered studying psychology. That pull toward the mechanics of the mind never really left. I just found a different medium for exploration.

See the sketches of how this sculpture was created. Sleepwalker is constructed on a steel wire armature with semi-translucent legs of polymer-saturated mulberry paper. The upper body is opaque fiber and plaster-polymer skin.