Ash: The Hidden Door Within the Hidden Door

It all began with a dream.

In the dream, I found myself repeatedly speaking the words: "Ash Leigh" or "Ashley Dance."

Only later did I discover that in Old Irish, Aisling (pronounced ash-ling) means "dream" or "vision." (Robert Moss ). The dream lingered, carrying the peculiar feeling that it was pointing toward something not yet fully formed.

Following the thread of that dream led me to a crown chakra activation event in Stirling with Matias. De Stefano and R. E. Grant. During the activation, I climbed to the top of the Wallace Monument, standing there among the eight arches that crown the tower, I offered a prayer for a friend navigating a difficult period in their life.

As I looked around, I was suddenly reminded of one of my paintings, The 8th Dimension. It felt less like a coincidence and more like another breadcrumb on an unfolding path.

A few weeks later, another dream door appeared.

This time, it was the Hidden Door Festival, held within the urban ruins of an old paper factory in Edinburgh.

I have been whirling for 3 weeks almost every day, holding the word " Ash"

ASH, the Art of Spontaneous Humanity.

At first, the experiment might appear to be an exploration in movement or participatory art. Yet the more we explored it, the more it seemed to be investigating something deeper: agency, relationship, and the living nature of creativity itself.

My inquiry revolves around questions that often remain hidden beneath the surface of festivals and cultural events.

Festivals frequently operate through an unconscious division of roles.

Artists create and audiences consume.

But what happens if that boundary begins to soften?

What happens when audiences become co-creators?

When witnessing becomes participation?

When a forgotten corner of a festival transforms into a living ecosystem where art continuously appears and disappears?

During conversations with Roddy, Rosie, Chloe, Markulf and Amy we found ourselves returning to the festival's own name: Hidden Door but also the concept of Ma 間 in Japanese which means "the space in between". Having studied Japanese and Chinese characters back in France when I was a student, I looked at the composition of this character 間 which is made of the character door and the sun in the middle.

Symbolically, our experiment seems to ask whether there is another hidden door concealed within the festival itself.

A hidden door in the architecture of participation.

A threshold between watching and presence.

The visible activity may simply be a handful of people moving through an abandoned factory space among the visual art installation, yet beneath that surface lies a deeper inquiry, one that mirrors fundamental questions about human consciousness and relationship.

What happens when the distinction between observer and creator begins to dissolve?

Most social environments are structured through predefined roles: artist and audience, teacher and student, performer and witness. These distinctions can be useful and necessary. Yet they also determine what kinds of relationships and experiences are possible.

Our exploration seems to inhabit a third space.

Not performer.

Not audience.

Participant.

Not spectacle.

Encounter.

I think of it as an emergent relational field: a temporary zone where experience is co-created through presence, attention, movement, curiosity, responsiveness, and play.

Within such a field, no one knows exactly what the artwork is because the artwork is continuously being generated by the relationships unfolding in real time.

From a consciousness perspective, the question becomes:

What forms of awareness, connection, and creativity become possible when people are invited out of passive observation and into shared emergence?

For me, this is as much a research question as an artistic one. It is something I explore daily through movement, dreamwork, creative practice, and the study of participation itself.

Dreams rarely maintain rigid boundaries between self and world. The dreamer and the dreamed intermingle, haracters emerge, transform, disappear, and reappear within an alive, always changing landscape of meaning.

Our experiment carries a similar quality.

Visitors may arrive believing they are observers of an artwork, only to discover that their attention, hesitation, curiosity, movement, or participation is actively shaping the experience itself.

Perhaps this is the hidden door we are exploring, not really a physical entrance within an old factory, but a threshold in perception itself.

A doorway into a different way of relating to art, to one another, and perhaps even to consciousness.

A doorway that only appears when someone steps into it.