Tripping

Alice represents the romance of the innocent child, the screen for Carroll’s fantasy projections, a cipher for the thrill of mind altering substances at once weirdly eroticised, intellectualised, sublimated. What if she wants the drugs and adventure, says spare me your fears of death and desire, the limits of your imagination so afraid of the devouring and the control? The big bad world is a dangerous place for girls, lies, all lies and fabrication, the queen of hearts a troll. Seduced by sleep, drugged and hallucinating, Alice falls and falls and follows and falls, eat me, drink me, identity crisis one two three.

with my figurative work focusing on the the expression of emotion through the physicality and sequence of motion, my intension is to bring movement - possibly via line to this project. by using bread and stones hanzel and gretel marked the uncertainty of their passage into the unknown, how would we retrace the physical patterns of our emotional histories? a starting point.......

Down the rabbit hole

Alice's adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, a small, still-pastoral tale at once mad, moral and pedagogic for children, and clever and knowing for adults. Smack in the middle of a decade that would be marked out as the moment when modernism gathered momentum it nonetheless looks back at a mythical English past as represented by childhood. You can hear between the lines the crunching gears of modernity; a smugness in the clever dick rationality and superiority of Man; a parallel to the Victorian idealisation of Woman and the reality that you could buy a 13 year old girl for £5.

Alice is fearless in the face of the many and varied challenges to her identity and cleverness - she is not master of this or any other universe. The question is, does she remember any of this when she grows up? How could she possibly forget.

My contribution to Frailty in thought will be to make a work about Alice's adult point of view on the adventures in which she found herself.