Daydreaming

By Ross Jones

Alice presents a surreal yet intimate scene in which a figure rests along the edge of a swimming pool filled with impossibly blue water and floating tennis balls. The balls drift and bob across the surface, creating a quiet absurdity that blurs the line between reality and imagination. The moment suggests a suspended state of thought - a world where perception, memory, and daydream quietly overlap.

The work reflects on the nature of attention and distraction, recalling the experience of drifting inward while the external world continues uninterrupted. It considers how observation can shift between presence and absence, and how “noticing” often happens outside structured focus. In this sense, the painting becomes less about action and more about awareness - or the lack of it.

At its core, Alice explores daydreaming as a private, generative space of thought. Rather than a failure of attention, it is framed as a form of internal movement - a place where ideas form, shift, and reassemble without constraint. The floating tennis balls become a metaphor for these passing thoughts: repetitive, light, and endlessly circulating.

The narrative also draws on memory and observation, where small, unexpected details - such as a sudden burst of colour in an ordinary landscape - remain more vivid than formal instruction or structured learning. These moments accumulate into a way of seeing that privileges curiosity over attention as discipline.

Ultimately, Alice sits within the tension between focus and drift, asking whether awareness is always linear, or whether it naturally expands into quieter, less defined spaces of thought.