Discussed by guitarist and singer-songwriter Thurston Moore and writer Nick Soulsby in the 2024 documentary 'CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint' (85 mins), 'House of Sleep' is a pivotal work as it started Chris Gollon's 19-year fascination with artistic boundary crossing, and his lifelong fascination with how one art form can influence another and take it somewhere new. It gave Gollon a third way of using music to create new imagery.

In 1998, Thurston Moore sent Chris Gollon, David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Gavin Turk and others each a unique 52-second tape, inviting them to produce a work of art or music in response which led to the exhibition 'ROOT' at Chisenhale Gallery, London.

The following are two excerpts from the 2019 'CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon' museum exhibition catalogue. Kindly loaned from a private collection, this was the first time 'House of Sleep' was exhibited in 21 years.

“…this 52-second piece reminded me of Native American burial grounds – it sounded like chimes… I’d seen Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford and one of the opening scenes was where he rode his horse through a burial ground… Also, I had a studio on an island on the Thames and you could only get there by boat or a little footbridge… there was a tiny studio that made prosthetic arms and legs and they used to hang them from a washing line and they’d blow in the wind. That started reminding me again of Native American burial grounds… I’d recently been to Toledo Cathedral and they hang all the Cardinals’ hats from the ceiling and let them rot… I used to go to the Glasgow Print Studio and one year they had a crossover exhibition about death. The boys from Glasgow sent all their little drawings of skulls to Mexico and the Mexicans sent their death masks to Glasgow… So when you look at the picture you can see the cardinal’s hat hanging from the top, there’s all the chiming going on, then I use the mask… I also at the time was reading about the Kingdom of Sleep which comes from Greek mythology and it’s about Morpheus, the God of dreams. I imagined him to look like a Mexican death mask… The House of Sleep, it’s a place where Thanatos, death, lived with his mother who is called Nyx, which is night. Sleep itself has wings, same as death, and it’s a dwelling place, as described in Ovid, visited by Morpheus, the God of dreams, which is where we get morphia — morphine — from…” excerpt from an interview with Chris Gollon, first published in 'Thurston Moore – We Sing A New Language' by Nick Soulsby (Omnibus Press, 2017)

From ROOT onwards, Gollon used music in three different ways: simply played in his studio to infuse his work with energy; or lyrics providing footholds for ideas for images, partially inspiring works directly; or, by a two-way collaborative boundary crossing, working directly with composers, musicians and songwriters." Extract from the foreword by exhibition curator and catalogue editor, David Tregunna, for the museum retrospective 'CHRIS GOLLON: Beyond the Horizon' (2019 - 2020).