MALLORY PAGE: much to a nightmare's delight

“It came to me suddenly, as if it had been staring at me longingly waiting to be discovered, that

the accumulation of my nightmares had become more transformative than the sum of my dreams.
The curiosity and questions they channeled became the most influential tool to finding
a vast interior cosmology that traces identity through expanses of time and asks the
contemporary to match symbols for a waking soul to remember.”
—Mallory Page

In Much to A Nightmare’s Delight, Mallory Page extends her inquiry into painting as an atmospheric and psychological register. Working with thin, layered washes of acrylic, she constructs surfaces that do not depict but rather emanate—spaces where sensation accumulates, flickers, and recedes. Her term “the shell of an atmosphere” captures this approach: a membrane of mood and memory suspended between presence and dissolution.

This new body of work introduces a heightened chromatic complexity. Where earlier compositions often relied on the rigor of monochrome, these paintings unfold in spectral tones—slivers of prismatic light, subtle shifts in density, moments when color seems to hold its breath. They evoke transitional states: when the day darkens but hasn’t yet ended, or when a purple haze lingers in the air, neither arriving nor departing. What emerges is not narrative but emotional velocity—unfixed, enigmatic, and intimate.

Though abstract in form, Page’s paintings are dense with symbolic residue. Shells, vapor, thresholds, and unnamed forces recur—not as motifs, but as imprints of psychic terrain. Describing her process as “psycho-atmospheric,” she positions abstraction as a means of tracing the interior: the nonlinear pulse of thought, memory, intuition. The titles—Whispers frozen by repetition, Shapeshifter’s taboos (vapor reviving vapor)—suggest a mutable self, dissolving and re-forming within an unstable emotional field.

In Do I protect her or does she protect me, Page introduces a rare figurative element: a luminous shell resting at the heart of the composition. Radiating outward in translucent layers, the shell becomes a quiet focal point for questions of care, strength, and vulnerability—what it means to hold and to be held.

Page’s practice resists resolution. Her compositions are accumulations—of mood, material, gesture—gradually built through a tactile and intuitive logic. Rather than explain, they ask; rather than describe, they absorb. The result is work that operates as both presence and echo—soft-edged yet charged, enigmatic yet exacting.

These paintings linger in that threshold where the subconscious stirs—quiet, potent, and elusive.
Not quite dreamscapes, they are guided by the intuitive logic of the nightmind—where questions rise in the absence of resolution, and meaning takes shape through sensation. They hold the emotional residue of what lies beneath the surface, transforming it into something both tender and expansive.