Earlier this month, one of Govanhill Baths residents artists debuted their new work. DREAMLANDS was an installation of ceramics and a sound piece that was the culmination of several community workshops. We caught up with Mina to find out all about it.

Interview by Becki Menzies with photography by Erika Stevenson.

Over the past year Mina Heydari-Waite, a Culture Collective Artist in Residence at Govanhill Baths Community Trust, has been weaving together the dreams of women* and people of marginalised genders*** in the Southside.

‘Dreamlands’ is a research project led by Mina that attends to dream-life, exploring how it might operate as a point of departure to imagine new ways to occupy space in our shared waking world.

Earlier this month the project culminated in an exhibition at 20 Albert Road that featured a series of totemic ceramic objects made by women* from global majority backgrounds** who took part in ‘the dreamlands pottery’ workshops. Soundtracking the physical pieces was a collective of voices which weaved together a constellated dreamscape. This audio work (made in collaboration with sound designer William Aikman) used ideas and images from ‘in walking together we make the path’, a social dreaming group open to people of marginalised genders***, and featured members of the group voicing fragments of one another’s dreams.

Becki Menzies spoke to Mina about moving to Glasgow and the inspiration behind DREAMLANDS.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to Glasgow?

Sure. So I went to art school in Edinburgh. I moved from London when I was 18, and I lived there for six years. I stayed after graduating. I knew I wanted to stay in Scotland, but didn’t fully settle in Edinburgh. When I moved to Glasgow it felt like a bit more of a diverse place and a lot more like home. Glasgow's got a lot of different creative scenes existing side by side, which was really exciting to me.

And what brought you to Govanhill specifically?

I lived here for five years. When I first moved here, Govanhill’s diversity and sense of community reminded me a lot of the community I grew up in. It felt like somewhere I could live for a really long time and make my home. I think what I said about Glasgow, in response to your first question, maybe I was really talking about Govanhill.

What was the inspiration behind Dreamlands?

I'm interested in ways that we can creatively challenge how we think about the world. One of the great things about working with dreams is that they are places you can be absurd. In dreams you do things that you're not allowed to do; or things that are inappropriate; or things that you'd rather not articulate in waking life but feel the need to express. They’re places where we work out some of the really difficult aspects of our social lives. Our dream-lives express a lot about the communities we live in and the cultures we’re a part of.

Dreams don't just speak to one person's internal life. So when you come together and share dreams, you suddenly see all these links. It can be a really moving experience cause you feel very connected, and you realise that there are things that you are dreaming about as a group of people.

There's something powerful about sharing those very private aspects of your life and realising that they're linked, they're not just private, they're also part of a social network, a public life.

The project ran for a year, how did you find that?

When I started working on Dreamlands a year ago, I wanted to create different points of entry. So there was a social dreaming group that met once a month, and that was open to anyone of a marginalised gender.

Then there was a pottery group made up of women from global majority backgrounds. I felt working with clay was a more embodied and sensory way to think together. So the pottery was a way to come at the ideas I wanted to explore using a more materials-led physical process, alongside the more literal, verbal dream sharing process.

It's been really nice to give everything time to come together, and watch the project unfold over the year. Especially because the project is about dreaming, it would have felt quite strange to try and force an outcome really quickly in a few months. It needed the time to slowly reveal what it needed to be. The year allowed us to follow lines of interest more naturally, without the pressure to finish things before they were ready.

Did you find anything that was super challenging?

I haven't thought about this for a while, but picking who was gonna be in the ceramics group was so hard because we had like maybe 40 women who wanted to do it, which was amazing. But I guess it was challenging seeing all these creative people were interested in the project and then having to balance that level of interest with the need to have a small, regular group where I could support everyone, and encourage intimate, sustainable connections. It’s a lot harder to do that in larger groups.

Especially because I really wanted to work with women from lots of different backgrounds. And in a big group, the numbers can kind of prevent people from gelling sometimes. In my experience with larger groups, people are more likely to stick to people they knew before, or to the people they think have most in common with. They basically create mini-groups within the group. Something just changes when you have more than eight people in a room, something shifts and it becomes less personal.

I ended up just pulling names out of a hat, but I would have loved to have enough time and resources to work with everyone who wanted to get involved.

So, what’s next? Do you plan to keep the project going?

So I am one of five Artists in Residence at Govanhill Baths, and we are all doing very different projects in response to the overarching theme of ‘OCCUPY!’. We’re part of a pilot program called Culture Collective, which was funded by Creative Scotland to give artists longer-term contracts to work with communities and test new ways of working. My contract comes to an end in June, and I will be leading some stand alone social dreaming and amulet making workshops (you can sign up to two in April here!). But I also think the coming months will be about ending this project well. The end of these sorts of projects, if not given proper time and attention, can feel like a sudden break up. I’m lucky that this funding has given me the opportunity to wrap up slowly and reflectively. I want to spend time with people I’ve worked with, to evaluate and document our work together and tie up loose ends.

Often artworks made in community settings are shown in a corridor in between a canteen and an office and can feel just crammed in there. So it's been really nice to have an opportunity to do this exhibition in a gorgeous gallery space. I think this project has been a real collaboration between me and the groups I have worked with. And it’s been great to be able to treat it as a collaboration that deserves as much of a platform as my solo work, or collaborations I’ve done with other ‘professional artists’, rather than it just being a couple of workshops that are done as an outreach program that then kind of gets forgotten or sidelined.

Sometimes organisations completely just focus on the engagement, and forget the work it produces. They’re like, “Oh, we did loads of workshops”. And I always feel like, great ok, but also what about the work made in those workshops? Cause that sounds like a lot of hours that everyone put in to make things, and to have meaningful conversations, and I want to see that work honoured.

I’m really grateful that this project has given me space to really think about that. I'd love to keep doing this project! And if I can’t, it will definitely continue to inform my future work.

*DREAMLANDS’ use of the word women is inclusive of trans and intersex women. This project was also open to non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience of women.

**Global majority is a collective term that refers to people who are Black, Asian, Brown,mixed-heritage and/or indigenous to the global south.

***DREAMLANDS’ use of the phrase marginalised genders includes transgender women, cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary people, and other gender identities that have been systematically oppressed by those in power, both historically and in the present.

You can find out more about the project at Mina's website