Drawing on the familiar rituals of sleepovers – midnight feasts, whispered conversations, star-gazing, makeshift forts and sleeping bag stair toboggans – Kitt explores how social sleeping can deepen emotional connection and reshape our understanding of care, intimacy and belonging.

 

Central to Kitt’s research is the idea of ‘emotional heritage’: the way feelings accumulate within buildings, and how they are shaped, shared, and passed on through the communities who inhabit them. 

​​

​

"I think of the work as a collection of resources and invitations. I hope they help visitors dream, connect, mess on and maybe even plan some riotous mischief...

​

I invite you to use While We Slumber as a place to experience Emotional Heritage at God’s House Tower. Emotional Heritage is a phrase I use to describe the inheritance of feelings in specific communities/ buildings.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

At GHT I've been particularly interested in the history of social sleeping here. How this has contributed to the open, welcoming way the building feels and functions now, despite some of it’s sad and complex pasts. Previous communal slumber includes: incarceration in the 1700s & 1800s, artist residencies and a 30 hour ukulele jam! My research has also included hosting a sleepover at GHT in April this year. 

​

I’ve created and gathered objects, activities and experiences which I hope offer visitors some tools to:

• rest / sleep / dream

• be creative 

• connect to other people (now, throughout history and in our imagined futures)

​

The objects and activities include:

• Christmas beds* ( please feel free to sit / lay /rest/ doze on these)

• Sleeping bags and a ‘slide’ (which can be used for sleeping bag tobogganing)

• Dressing gowns, slippers, eye masks and noise cancelling headphones 

• soundscape created by composer Bridie Jackson (who is also my sister). The sounds include recordings of me and my children sleeping over at Bridie’s house.

• Midnight Feast snacks (available at the Welcome Desk on the ground floor)

• Making activities downstairs in the cafe ( you can craft things to add to the exhibition in the main gallery or to take home with you as a reminder of what Emotional Heritage means to you)

• Handmade soaps scented with lavender and mint (smells people brought with them for the research sleepover) the soaps are in the toilets downstairs and by the fountain in the project space 

• A public sleepover event in October

​

“Nightmares lose their power”: more thoughts about social sleeping and Emotional Heritage at GHT: When political and ecological turmoil affects our daily lives, places like GHT & the communities who tend to them, become increasingly vital. It’s not only the physical space which is needed, but the way it can make us feel. GHT communities have told me again and again over the last year that this place is warm, welcoming, freeing, emboldening. A community. A creative home. And I’ve experienced this too. Every time I visit, I feel like these emotions are literally wound around and growing from the building. A perfect place to house collaborative dreaming (through both sleep and creativity). 

​

​

I reckon there’s a kind of feral vulnerability that happens when groups of people sleep / dream  / make in close proximity. A potent closeness- a type of magic, I suppose, not that glittery, fairy, puff ball stuff- something a bit more grotty, chaotic and radgey**. Sharing stale dream-licked breath, makeshift den building skills and half-waking chatter brings the alchemy of shared empathies. A lush and mighty start from which to grow:

•  solace, 

• solutions, 

• new ways of doing, making and being.

​

As an artist, crafting resources for collective imagining seems useful, hopeful, & maybe a little mischievous.  For me, art offers resources (material, relational and conceptual) to make space where we can feel safer, braver, wilder.  Places where we can world-build through hard times, rehearsing revolutions for better days ahead. Places where, to paraphrase Daniel Fountain’s text on the work, “… nightmares lose their power”."

​

​

*a phrase used by an attendee at the research sleepover Kitt held at GHT. It describes makeshift beds created from whatever is around for communal sleeping with extended family, often as part of holidays / celebrations

 

** a slang Pitmatic / Geordie term from North East England (where Kitt is from) meaning a wild / free person or action. Though historically often used in a more negative , often classist, context (with overtones of aggression) more recently the term is being reclaimed, particularly by working class North Eastern communities to mean unfettered, free thinking / acting, and creatively unrestrained.

​

​