Utilizing sculpture, drawing, photography and text, Shirley Wiebe’s multi-part installation forms a personal narrative driven by an engagement with the emotional and sensory content of dreams. Known as a master of re-purposed everyday materials, she draws on the deep personal and collective meanings or specific forms and physical objects – a house, a door, a window, a stairway, a bridge – that re-occur throughout her practice.

The Hidden Door takes its title from Carl Jung’s description of the dream as “a small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul…” This exhibition of new sculpture and mixed-media work has come out of Wiebe’s lifelong practice of maintaining a dream journal. Presented as an interconnected installation, it gives physical form to this private world and the mysteries beyond consciousness.

Wiebe’s project reflects on wakefulness and dreaming, the boundaries between the seen and unseen, the remembered and the forgotten, and points to the connection between an individual and a collective unconscious. I began keeping a dream journal in my mid-twenties, when I first understood dreams as muse, messenger, and unseen choreographer. This is the first time I have returned to the full collection of writings as the basis for an exhibition. Using commonplace objects and materials, I give form to the sensations and narratives of dreaming. Through this tactile process, I explore dreams’ unresolved and shadow qualities; discomfort, uncertainty, wonder, strange creatures, and the inexplicable.

Image:
Encounter, 2026
Mixed-media on photograph
20x26 inches