Nursted, from the sleep side

An invitation to enter Nursted, from the sleep side, passing through the threshold, and arriving into what seems like waking, just in time to see the sun set.

In her essay “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)”, Anne Carson describes her first memory: a dream in which she is standing in her childhood living room. She finds the room unchanged—the same dark green sofa, the same pale green walls—"and yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.”  She later explained the dream to herself by saying that she must have entered the room “from the sleep side”: that she had caught it sleeping. 

I love this idea: that a room, or an object, a place or even a work of art might be able to fall asleep. Later in the essay, Carson talks about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and how the novel itself falls asleep halfway through.

Nursted, a 16th century manor house, has been home to the same family for some fifty years, having emigrated from Europe. C first invited me in the summer of 2021. Her mother had died that winter and she had returned to care for her father. As the couple aged, nature slowly began to take hold of the house, the creepers which clung to its sides snaking their way into some of the rooms. Both talented artists, C’s mother had painted with a magic realist touch—flavours of Chagall—while her father had been a passionate photographer (the darkroom still exists to some degree). A left-leaning theoretical anarchist, he dealt in reproductions and prints, whilst also working extensively outdoors.

Arriving at Nursted I beheld a lost domain of crepuscular calm. I must have entered from the sleep side. I snuck around with allergic glee, finding a kind of Tarkovsky film set intact, whose spores and dust triggered my atopic condition, shooting my first roll of 16mm on a newly acquired Bolex. I became an addict and have since returned three times, once in summer and twice in winter, but irrespective of the season the interior remains perpetually cool; indeed I suspect the whole domain has a micro climate, and a temporal scale at odds with its surrounds. Here the lines between what is body, what is architecture and what is nature have become smudged and indecipherable, glyphs from a forgotten script. Perhaps they are no longer there. That his room has been kept much as it was when he was still active and speaking, permitted me to get to know C’s father, or at least imagine I did, through his interests and passions, multiple versions of him living out different timeframes.  

In Bruno Schulz’s short story “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” and its subsequent adaptation by Wojciech Has: The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), a young man goes to visit his elderly father in a remote Polish town where he is living out his final days in a bizarre sanatorium where the patients sleep almost all the day. The place offers a deal that is hard to refuse: time turned back. He finds that when he slips beneath the bed, an alternate world exists in the local town; his father has set up his old fabric shop and is giving speeches in the square: “Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books, whole stanzas of quivering pointed swallows? One must interpret the flight of these birds”.

Back at Nursted, C’s father sits quietly in his room, his face uncannily his, yet altered. By all accounts he was a taciturn man, but a funny one, and when he is in a good way you can feel it; by the glint in his eyes, his rogue wink, the comedic collage he once made of six versions of himself showcasing his outdoor tools. I am sure we would have got on.

On the waking side, C is breathing life back into the place, inviting artists to come and make work, putting on events, generously hosting. I like to think that somewhere on the sleep side, her father is still out driving old cars, fabricating furniture out of fallen trees, taking photos, cracking jokes.