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ArtistA completed dream artefact presented as a single underground comic page. Twelve portrait-format panels arranged in a 3×4 grid with thick black borders between every panel. A solid black header spans the top of the page with nothing inside it. Use the uploaded curly-haired bearded man as the dreamer and artist throughout. Rich underground comix style, detailed crosshatching, expressive pen work, luminous ceramic-glaze colours, dreamlike atmosphere. Panel sequence: Ocean Beach, San Diego at dawn. The dreamer stands beside the shoreline where a stingray rests in the sand. A young Jewish boy, not yet old enough for his bar mitzvah, offers a blank ceramic tile. The dreamer begins drawing a girl within a vertical frame. The portrait seems to emerge from the ceramic surface. A worktable covered with mortars, frits, oxides, emulsions, glaze tests, and alchemical ceramic tools. The girl’s portrait develops through layers of liquid glaze and chemistry. The dreamer studies the image while bowls of glaze swirl with pale green and black pigments. Porcelain test tiles and glaze samples reveal the reduction of the palette toward black oxide. A jar of black oxide appears like a container of stars and night sky. The dreamer sculpts a strange green-tinted high-silica porcelain figure. The Golem Girl emerges: abstract, vertical, blob-like, with thin arms and unfinished lower body, suspended between object and person. The dreamer works on the comic page itself. The sculpture and portrait appear inside the panels, revealing that the comic and artefact are the same object. Hypnagogic space between sleep and waking. The dreamer lies in bed while the comic page, glazes, portrait, and Golem Girl continue creating themselves in luminous dream space. Colour palette: turquoise glaze greens, porcelain whites, deep black oxides, warm amber studio light, ocean blues, copper browns, midnight indigos, subtle gold highlights. Emphasize recursion and self-reference: the comic panels are the dream artefact, and the dream artefact contains the comic panels. The work feels unfinished yet alive, continuing beyond the dream. No words, no captions, no lettering, no symbols, no labels anywhere. High detail, vibrant colour, surreal ceramic alchemy, underground comic aesthetic.
Dream Artefact
Burnaby, British Columbia
June 16, 2026
5:13 AM – 7:33 AM
The Golem Girl
I am in San Diego, California, at Ocean Beach, standing near the place where I was stung by a stingray in my big toe when I was eight years old.
A young Jewish boy is with me, probably in his early teens, not yet old enough for his bar mitzvah. He wants me to create an image of a girl. He wants the image made as a ceramic glaze work.
The dream lasts for hours and revolves entirely around the creation of a dream artefact. The comic panels themselves are the dream artefact. I am working on the artefact, and the girl I am trying to create is part of the same object. The making of the image and the dream artefact are inseparable.
I begin sketching within a portrait-oriented frame, approximately five by three inches. As I draw, I am thinking constantly about chemistry. I am considering a high-frit glaze, something stable that will not react excessively or create bubbles during firing. I am working with emulsions and somehow incorporating the emulsions into the glaze itself.
I am considering black oxide as a pigment. At first there seem to be two colours involved, black and white, but eventually I realize the white is unnecessary. It contributes nothing to the process and only complicates the chemistry.
Later I begin sculpting. The material is strange, a clay resembling a high-silica porcelain with a faint greenish tint. The boy still wants a girl. What emerges is highly abstract: a vertical blob-like figure with thin arms extending from its sides. I keep trying to form legs, but I never quite succeed. The figure remains incomplete, suspended between an object and a person.
The dream continues and continues. The work never feels finished. Even when I awaken at 7:33 AM, I am still mentally working on the comic panels. I am still thinking about glazes, chemistry, pigments, and form.
At some point near waking, I enter a hypnagogic state. I am neither fully asleep nor fully awake. In this in-between condition I continue working on the cartoon frames as though the dream has spilled across the boundary into consciousness. The images remain active. The artefact remains unfinished.
I love this state—the threshold between sleeping and waking—where the work seems able to continue on its own.
