Dream Room:
Time Warp through Coraline’s Door and into Treasure!

By Sushmita Mazumdar
National Building Museum, 2016

In early 2016 I was invited to join a project at the National Building Museum in conjunction with their upcoming exhibit, Small Stories: At Home in a Dollhouse, which was traveling to Washington DC from the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in London. They had invited 24 regional artists to create their own dream rooms in boxes the museum would send. They would all be arranged as a Dream House in the last room of the exhibit.

As I create this new website, I want to put this project here. As I re-live the process photos I find myself energized! Check out the story and enjoy the photos below.

Here’s what I wrote in my Artist’s Statement:

When Sushmita left India to come to the US to marry her sweetheart, she had to tear herself away from a family, a place, a culture, and an identity that had formed over 29 years. As she started her new family in a new culture a new identity started to form. She was now also a wife, and immigrant, a foreigner, and a mom.

And then she was an artist and writer. When her friend asked her why all the stories she writes for her handmade artist’s storybooks were about a girl from India, Sushmita realized that a physical move hardly represents places where the soul resides.

In her Dream Room: Time Warp through Coraline’s Door and into Treasure! Sushmita imagines a place for the unfinished conversations, the constellations of untold stories, and the characters from her life that are lost in time. She dreams of a tiny Coraline’s door of her own that would take her into another world, through a tear in time, where she could meet people like they were “back then” so she could finish the conversations and record the stories from that vast treasure she left behind.