Animating the Interior By Nikē Baneberry

Depressions - Bed Cave - Sinking into the work - Layer - Stratification - Intersectional

A grid of nine drawings in pen, each coloured with pencil crayon.
How many beds have held me?
From straw beds, to beds of gravel, I have made homes in many places, pushing in with my body and heavy heart into earth me-like shape to lie in. A bed - literally a depression in a material has come to mean a rectangular mattress where we lay every night. But a bed is so much more than a frame and a cushion - it’s a container for all our wild unruly imaginings.
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The sediment at the bottom of a river. The gravel bed of a foundation. Strength is in how easily it can drain, water slipping through the cracks. Gabion wall construction. Baskets filled with rocks, the way we collect doodads and memories. Making a fortress with piled up affirmations.
Straw beds: the way deer make round dimples in the grass in the summer months. The way birds stuff their nests with straw to hold their eggs softly. Palisade: the princess and the pea, layers of straw stuffed mattresses piled on-top one another into a tier of comfort. Our own luxury nests. Sensing the pea beneath it all, an autistic shoutout. Straw bale house: the wall assembly of a straw and cob house. Large thick walls serving as a sound proofing. The sounds of madness from inside are muffled.
A fossil bed, a remnant of something that once existed. Imprints and tracings preserved in the earth's crust. The layering of rocks, water, and soil over huge geological time spans. Each line is like the ring of a tree - a window into the past. A rammed earth wall, of dirt, lime, chalk. Compacted together into striped composition. Tamped down while moist and then dried. Layers pressed together into a singular form.
Three pen drawings on trace paper stacked on top of eachother, so you can see them all at the same time - like layers of ideas.
Folding in on myself
Three drawings - the fossil bed, the bed of straw, and the river bed are layered on top of one another in the scanning bed - compressing ideas and materials onto each other. Like my own mind, my own art practice, these drawings fold in on eachother, pressing into one another.
Depressions of the Bed

I am writing this from bed. Behind the academic sheen of this work there is a failed architect and a stubborn learner, most of my writing done in the comfort of my private bedroom. Pulling my sheets up to my chin, kicking my feet free, I flatten myself into the bed. I do a body scan, running my mind over my skin and joints, arms and face, is everything where it's supposed to be? Like carefully placing my drawings in the scan bed to see zoomed in details, I am examining my own body when I lay in bed.

These drawings explore what it means to be settled, to make a home. When you live in a place for a long time you can compound layers and layers of memories, routines start to form well worn tracks in the day. Laying in bed every night, each time your body pressing against the mattress, compressing ~ the reduction in volume (causing an increase in pressure) ~ the spot where I sleep every night with more dreams. The more time I spend in bed, the more the shape of my body starts to form a depression ~ persistent feeling of sadness ~ a sunken place.

The idea of a bed - bedh* to dig - is to dig yourself into place.

I've made my bed

now I have to lie in it

I'm digging myself further in

Getting further into this mess

Bury myself under the covers.

These drawings are layers of trace and graphite pencil and pen and pencil crayon. The way we add on and compile layers to our lives, I'm adding layers to these drawings. From architectural details to folk lore to different definitions and etymologies of the idea of a bed.

Rocks, clay, and straw settle into stratified compositions. They form deer beds, river beds, and fossil beds. A section through architectural wall details reveals a lamination of these very materials in the exterior wall assembly. Our homes are made of the very stuff of waterways, ancient fossils, and animal nests. The memory of millions of years of sand and clay and straw compounding on each other is evoked in the walls of our homes. Rammed earth, straw bale, gabion walls: three types of construction different from our typical building method of stud + insulation+ vapour barrier. These methods are unusual, and require particular knowledge to be able to assemble. Just the way my madness, disability, neurodivergence, queerness, transness, are a form of special knowledge that allow me to construct new worlds.

  • Straw: *stere meaning to spread. The same root word for construction. The way I spread out my drawing on the table. The way I spread my fingers as I reach for my love. The way I am spread thin - so that my efforts themselves are almost invisible.
  • Clay: *glei meaning to stick together. So clearly it is also the word for glue. The lamination of materials.
  • Gravel: eerily composed of the word grave: where we are told to take our secrets. Loose fragments of ideas and thoughts rumbling together, polished smooth like the river stones of washed out dreams.
Distorted sense of self Masked