'Happily Ever After' exhibition

'Happily Ever After' an exhibition of work by Su Blackwell opens at the Long and Ryle Gallery on Thursday 25th November and runs until the 18th December, 2010

Su says...

As in many recent works I will be focusing on fairy tales, with their haunting, dream-like atmosphere. This exhibition broadly explores the role of marriage within the fairy tale. In many fairy tales, marriage acts as a kind of a closing sequence for the “happy ending”, simply because it was an expected stage of life for women during the periods in which these tales were first told. In these new works, I question a different type of ending.

And the Long and Ryle site gives an insight into the way Su works...

Using a scalpel she cuts and glues the pages of books to create miniature dioramas glowing with lights in wood and glass boxes, like Victorian relics found in a museum of intrigue. She finds her books – or rather lets them find her – by trawling through second-hand book shops. She always reads the book first and this in turn inspires the work.

If you're in London I urge you to get to the exhibition, but if, like me, you're too far away there are at least lots of wonderful pictures to get lost in on Su's site.

Image: Jorinde and Jorindel, copyright Su Blackwell

Fundraising exhibition for The House of Fairy Tales

See The House of Fairy Tales or The Last Tuesday Society for more details.

Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA

Couldn't resist posting about this! A major Tim Burton retrospective will be opening to the public at MoMA from November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010. From their website:

'This exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film. It brings together over seven hundred examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, moving image works, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera from such films as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood, and Beetlejuice, and from unrealized and little-known personal projects that reveal his talent as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer working in the spirit of Pop Surrealism.'

Visit the MoMA blog for behind the scenes info, and The Guardian for a video of the exhibition's opening (I love the bit where Helena Bonham Carter, talking about how mind-blowing it is that his work is being celebrated at MoMA, says, 'he's not even dead yet I mean most people are dead when they get celebrated').

You can also see a preview of works from the exhibition on the Guardian website here. And the full MoMA website for the exhibition will be available from the 22nd (it's in preview mode at the moment but still well worth exploring!).

Addition to original post: Just found this too!

Exhibition - Enchanted Worlds

Enchanted Worlds: Art of Fairy Stories and Mermaid Tales is a fantastic exhibition at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, Lancashire until 5th September. When I visited I was really struck by how much they've managed to fit in, this is a treasure trove of paintings, illustrations, books, film, sculpture and puppets that cover the entwined worlds of fairy painters and fairy tales (five fairy tales are focused on in detail - Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Cap and Rumpelstiltskin, the texts of the versions they've used are avalaible here as PDFs). They also have the Cottingley fairy photographs and one of the cameras used to take them (if you're not familiar with the story this is a great local site with lots of detail on the hoax, which famously convinced the creator of the world's most famous detective that fairies lived at the bottom of a garden in Yorkshire).

Enchanted Worlds is the perfect title, the images you encounter in this exhibition are truly magical. There is the beautiful Arthur Rackham Jewels from the Deep, which was completed for but never used in Undine (a novella which George Macdonald thought 'the most beautiful' of all fairy stories), fairy paintings by masters such as Richard Dadd and William Blake. Rare first editions illustrated by the likes of Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Mervyn Peake are tantalisingly laid out in glass cabinets. La belle et la bête plays on one screen and Lotte Reiniger's Hansel and Gretel on another.

This eclectic sensory journey doesn't neglect contemporary artists either, there is a chance to see Quentin Blake's illustrations for Beauty and the Beast, Jan Pieńkowski's illustrations for Hansel and Gretel, David Hockney's Rumpelstiltskin drawings and Paula Rego's disturbing Little Red Riding Hood Suite, which definitely touches on the darker side of fairy tales.

With a fantastic room of activities for children containing fairy tale dressing up clothes, a puppet theatre, puzzles and books and a packed programme of events including curator talks and children's craft activities this is a fantastical treat not to be missed. But if you're too far away to visit a small selection of the artworks, including three of the Rego paintings and Rackham's Jewels from the Deep can be seen on the exhibition's Flickr page here.

fairy tales and... beds

Why beds? Well as a sleep deprived mother of toddlers a bed laden with plump mattresses and eiderdowns and some time to spend in it is one of my favourite fantasies, easily fuelled by the wonderful SurLaLune's gallery of Princess and the Pea illustrations (I will be linking to SurLaLune frequently as it is a wonderful site and the best fairy tale resource on the web!). The beautiful illustration on the right by Nicki Dennett, a lovely printmaker and illustrator who worked on issue 2 of New Fairy Tales, shows seven peas which is the number in the traditional Swedish tale which is thought to have influenced Andersen. The pea (or peas depending on which translation you read) has always fascinated me, I love the fact it is valued enough to be placed in the royal curiosity cabinet and I like to imagine it wasn't lost or stolen but is sitting there still, all shrivelled and dusty, looking like a little old lump of earwax.

Two brilliant picture book versions of the story are Mini Grey's hilariously inventive tale told from the point of view of the pea The Pea and the Princess and Lauren Child's The Princess and the Pea, with photography by Polly Borland. Child's version uses paper cut out people and dolls house furniture to create an enchanting miniature world. I was so excited to see some of the sets for the book (including the gorgeous little bed) at Manchester Art Gallery last summer as part of the Green Drops and Moonsquirters: The Utterly Imaginative World of Lauren Child exhibition. Now on tour, this incredibly child friendly exhibition is currently in Aberdeen and is heading on to Hull, Cardiff and then the wonderful Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle.

Beds also make me think of blankets and one of my favourite recent fairy tales is Carol Ann Duffy's The Princess' Blankets (published by the brilliant Templar) in which a princess who is always cold is smothered, by a stranger, in the ocean's blanket, the forest's blanket, the mountain's blanket and lastly the suffocating earth's blanket:

'The blanket was woven in the darkest brown. It was embroidered with corms and bulbs. There were tangled roots in the blanket, pale, hollow skulls, and the crumbling bones of dead creatures.'

Duffy's lyrical prose is illustrated by Catherine Hyde's sumptuous paintings which convey a real sense of texture and the enchanting beauty of the happy ending 'under a blanket of stars'. This is a stunning book which really has to be held to be appreciated.

I notice that Hyde will be part of the event Introducing Fairytales: Meaning and Making, on Saturday 3 October 2009, at the V&As current Telling Tales exhibition of fantasy and fear in contemporary design. Make sure you visit the exhibition's online treasure trove and look out for the Linen Cupboard House, by Jurgen Bey in the Forest Glade which looks like a lovely place to climb into and curl up for a sleep.

As for other famous fairy tale beds, well plenty of fairy tale characters seem to end up in them, whether in an enchanted sleep (Sleeping Beauty) or in someone else’s bed (Goldilocks, Snow White, the wolf!). And of course fairy tales make perfect bedtime reading but more on all that another time. Sweet dreams!

Illustration Princess and the Seven Peas, Collograph by Nicki Dennett