Millie Walton’s Exhibition Guide to Red Sky at Morning

It’s a cliché to write about dreams just as it is to say that art is surreal, liminal or imaginative. But what if I said I dreamt I was crying tears into a pool of fish and the fish gathered my tears into a ball of light that was brighter than molten magnesium.

That was the week of Barbie and the Mar-a-Lago raid. While people dressed in pink lycra and sweat bands were taking selfies in cardboard cut-out picture frames, men in suits and sunglasses were uncovering classified documents from behind a shower curtain, scattered across the floor and on a ballroom stage inside the former President’s Florida estate. It wasn’t clear which was cinema but does that distinction really even matter these days?

Those events didn’t happen simultaneously but that’s how I remember it. Since childhood, time doesn’t make sense. Without the regularity of terms and holidays, there’s little to hold on to: birthdays? Christmas? Seasons, although they’re becoming increasingly vague. It’s images and headlines that stick, not the facts but the shape of them. The way they looked on the screen when you lay doom scrolling in bed: Kylie Jenner clasping Timothée Chalamet’s shoulder at the Golden Globes and a body washed up on the beach.

It might seem flippant to conflate these things but the internet is a deeply shallow place.

The top headline for this week, last week and probably next: it is a bit grim, but it will pass. And while we wait, the fire rages on.

In Greek mythology, the gods took care of things. They often weren’t kind or fair, but they trusted in the power of transformation.

Imagine you are a rabbit with the run of a grand country estate. Hopping around from garden to field, dining room to conservatory. This is pretty much as good as it gets. Okay yes, there are some hunting paintings hanging on the walls, which are probably portraits of your ancestors strung up by their heels but they weren’t hung by you – you’re a nice rabbit not a psychopath – and what are you supposed to do about it anyway? You have paws not hands. Even if you could lift down the frames, the weight of them would surely break your back. In the face of things, the only thing you can do is pretend they’re not there and over time, as with everything, it will get easier.

Some things do change, however. For instance, we no longer use leeches to drain the blood of patients suffering from a headache, most people don’t believe in a flat Earth and we don’t have to go to a shop to buy our clothes. We don’t even have to buy them always. One black friday in the not so distant past, you could have bagged a camel ruched lace up shirt dress or light wash extreme rip mom jeans for absolutely nothing. Turns out it’s cheaper to give products away than to recycle them responsibly.

I remember the good old days when you just had to look up at the sky to know if it was going to rain.

I asked Chat GPT to tell me what the future holds and it told me that artificial intelligence will become increasingly important and integrated into daily life, enhancing our productivity and making our world more convenient. It was around the time that an AI-generated photograph had won a major prize and Nick Cave had defensively called an AI’s attempts to write lyrics in his style ‘bullshit’.

How about this, I thought with a dramatic pause, which I typed as an ellipsis: I tried to listen to a sea urchin but it hurt my head. The black dot pulsed for more than three seconds. Sea urchins lack vocal cords or other structures for vocalisation, it said.

Consider now the colour red. I’m talking about the feeling of red rather than a particular shade, like the sky filled with Saharan sand that later rubs your skin raw between the sheets; like the rising flush in your cheeks when you say something that you know to be only half true; like the blood vessels beneath your eyelids when you’ve wandered home half-drunk from drinking a bottle of cheap rose and talking about politics; like the time you pulled apart a metal fence and made a home for yourself inside a hedge.

Not long after I first moved to the city I called home to tell my Da that I couldn’t see the sun set between the buildings, that the sky appeared in slithers and that even then I couldn’t be sure it was actually sky and not a digital image and if the sky is being generated, I said, how could I be sure that anything is real.

When I say ‘real’, I mean permanent rather than true, I mean something with weight and presence, something that I can hold in my hand and press against my cheek, or not hold but feel nevertheless. Like water or light or love.

I think it was one of Sheila Heti’s characters who said that artists manifest themselves not in the world but in their art. Their art becomes like a reliquary for their soul, and that is what we encounter when we listen to music, pick up a book or stand in front of painting: a fragment of their soul. This is what brings the thing to life: the fragility of it.

Perhaps the dream with the fish and the tears and the light has made me sentimental, but you could say that when we experience art we are also holding the hand of the person who made it.

And if we are holding them aren’t they holding us?

I think there is hope in this.

Millie Walton is London-based writer and the digital editor of Apollo. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Burlington Contemporary, Flash Art and the British Journal of Photography among other titles.

She also writes fiction and is the founder of Babe Station, an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between motherhood and making art.