Sleeping State of Being by Sara Skorgan Teigen

Hypnagogia is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. Its opposite state is described as hypnopompic — the transitional state from sleep into wakefulness.

"The sketchbook has always been used as a tool to study and understand nature by drawing. My sketchbooks with photographs, drawings and collages become the physical gathering point where impressions and observations of the outside world and my inner world meet. The psychological truth takes physical form and is manifested in the pages of the sketchbook; studying and drawing structures taken from nature gives me time to reflect on how forms and rules coexist. I use myself as subject and object, playing, wondering and questioning my own role in life, and moving between the personal and the archetypal. I map my inner landscapes through the design of the sketchbook's pages.

A key in the project is how the sketchbook as a medium never insists on a conclusion or a final answer, but is an investigative medium in itself. This goes hand-in-hand with my fascination with the things we cannot see, such as the micro/macro-cosmos, psychological and emotional experiences and existential questions, which also do not have or can ever have any definitive answers.

The sketchbook form allows me to examine these really big questions that take up so much space in me, but which, with words alone, so quickly fall into cliché."SKT

Sleeping State of Being (Journal 2021) from sara skorgan teigen on Vimeo.