For the Summer Group Show at Olsen Gallery, Babette Robertson presents new works from her ongoing investigation into the structures and residues of dreams. Each painting begins with written dream accounts, moving through watercolour studies that distil its logic, atmosphere, and shifting symbols of the dream state. These distilled fragments eventually expand into large-scale paintings, treating dreams not as intimate narratives but as shared symbolic architectures drawn from a collective unconscious.

This dream-based approach represents an evolution within Robertson’s wider practice. It follows her earlier environmental mapping projects—most notably Every Fallen Tree (2018–), a long-term documentation of 7,000 fallen trees created in homage to Joseph Beuys’ 7,000 Oaks. Where her attention once focused on physical landscapes and ecological erosion, it now turns toward psychic terrain. Natural forms remain, but altered: a fallen tree no longer reflects ecology, but memory—less fact, more feeling.

Across these new works, Robertson explores how dreams register and reshape the pressures of the present moment. Rather than offering escape, distort, repeat, and insist that we confront what waking life often obscures.