The Tales We Tell
What are the tales we tell our children, what were we told ourselves?
Fairy tales speak of magic, enchantment and wondrous events. They people the young minds with possibilities, with curious beasts, evil stepmothers, prophetic visits, trolls and murder. threy can be very dark
I have been drawn to this subject by a particular aspect of art-based family history;
a distant relative, Kay Nielsen, was in his day a celebrated illustrator, and prioduced beautiful iconic books of fairy tales.
These books, especially East of the Sun and West of the Moon and In Powder and Crinoline, formed a part of my own childhood, as well as every other generation of our family.
I accepted them, adored the beautiful images, passed them to my children.
Only on a revisit am I so struck by the brutality, the uncanny aspects, and the messaging.
Kay Nielsen later went on to work for Wakt Disney - a natural path for looking further into these images and ideaas we feed to the children.
further work will be focussing on the cartoon world, but here the basis of the collection;
The Tales We Tell
Each has a little book of the tale with it, as they can be quite obscure to modern audiences
Fairy tales speak of magic, enchantment and wondrous events. They people the young minds with possibilities, with curious beasts, evil stepmothers, prophetic visits, trolls and murder. threy can be very dark
I have been drawn to this subject by a particular aspect of art-based family history;
a distant relative, Kay Nielsen, was in his day a celebrated illustrator, and prioduced beautiful iconic books of fairy tales.
These books, especially East of the Sun and West of the Moon and In Powder and Crinoline, formed a part of my own childhood, as well as every other generation of our family.
I accepted them, adored the beautiful images, passed them to my children.
Only on a revisit am I so struck by the brutality, the uncanny aspects, and the messaging.
Kay Nielsen later went on to work for Wakt Disney - a natural path for looking further into these images and ideaas we feed to the children.
further work will be focussing on the cartoon world, but here the basis of the collection;
The Tales We Tell
Each has a little book of the tale with it, as they can be quite obscure to modern audiences
