Delphine Labedan

I found the work of Delphine Labedan online whilst looking for Fairy Tale illustrations. Labedan’s work shows an oriental influence and the subtilty and beauty of her drawings lead us into a magical fairy tale world. I particularly like ‘The Wolf and Red Riding Hood.’ where Labedan has created a forest atmosphere that is cold and threatening, but beautiful.

Born in Pau (Aquitaine), Labedan now lives and paints in Empordà. With a mother who studied Fine Arts and a photographer father, it is not so strange that Delphine should turn out to be an artist.

She likes to paint on large surfaces of canvas or wood, and uses different techniques, such as charcoal, pastels, collage, ink, watercolor and painting, with a preference for a mixed-oil technique. Aside from her work as an illustrator, she is presently teaching drawing and painting at the fine arts school in Salt (EMBA).

Su Blackwell

I was lucky enough to see some of Su Blackwell’s book sculptures at ‘The Devon Guild of Craftman’ craft centre at Bovey Tracey in 2019.

Su Blackwell, an RCA graduate and artist who works primarily in paper, makes delicate book sculptures and installations from the pages of second-hand books. 

The Tooth Fairy

Blackwell says of her work, “I often work within the realm of fairy-tales and folk-lore. I began making a series of book-sculpture, cutting-out images from old books to create three-dimensional diorama’s, and displaying them inside wooden boxes”.

Blackwell has exhibited her exquisite sculptures around the World. Her illustrated book of fairy tales ‘The Fairytale Princess’, published by Thames & Hudson was re-released in 2015.

Red Riding Hood 2010

The Girl in the Wood 2008

“For the cut-out illustrations, I tend to lean towards young-girl characters, placing them in haunting, fragile settings, expressing the vulnerability of childhood, while also conveying a sense of childhood anxiety and wonder. There is a quiet melancholy in the work, depicted in the material used, and choice of subtle colour.”

Princess and the Pea 2011

I just think her work is magical and love the way she includes lighting to emphasise the fairy tale world she has created.

Alice A Mad Tea Party 2007

The House in the Oak Tree 2015

Blackwell is turning her hand to stage design for the first time by creating the sets for The Snow Queen at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. "It starts off with an industrial, Victorian, brick town in Denmark, which is quite bleak and then as Girder travels through the seasons, it becomes a magical, fantasy world," says Blackwell. "My favourite scene is Mrs D's garden, which is quite surreal and topsy-turvy. I had fun playing with the scale of props for that and planning explosions of colour for the stage."

The Snow Queen

“Once in an old castle in the midst of a large dense forest…”

In 1992, Louise Bourgeois produced several cells devoted primarily to the theme of childhood. Cell (Choisy) “alluded” to her childhood home, Cell (Three white marble spheres) evoked the family trio and referred to education. Cell (You Better grow Up) is a summation of the whole series, and consists of mirrors, glass balls and clasped hands enclosed in a cell, a “seven by seven – foot cube.” Its sides are made of woven iron bars and glass. Three hands are carved in a block of pink marble. “Sitting on three pieces of wooden furniture are objects: a glass tower and three perfume bottles, a ceramic container with three openings, and a stack of glass shapes. The three hands are a metaphor for psychological dependency. The one large hand is holding the two small childlike hands as if to protect them. It is the hand of mentor of guide, of an active compassionate, responsible adult. The little hands are helpless and dependent. They are in a state of fear and anxiety, which makes them passive.”

Cell (You better grow up) 1993

The mirrors are set on the ceiling and walls, these enlarge the “cell” offering a form of escape. The mirrors “superimpose” each other, giving a multiple view of the world.

“The mirrors reflect the many difficult realities, one worse than the next. To the child the world they show seems distorted and disordered. To the reasonable adult, the view they give is not a frightening one, because, because the mechanism of the hinge is obvious”.

The perfume bottles put us in a nostalgic mood with the powerful recall of smell.

“The self-indulgent shapes in glass and in ceramic are a form of romanticism, a state of abandon, a laissez-faire attitude, a childlike dream.” says Bourgeois.

The older Bourgeois gets, the more, I feel she approaches her earliest childhood memories, and the size of her “reconstructions of childhood feelings” increase to “life – size” proportions.

‘You can arrest the present. You just have to abandon everyday your past. And accept it. And if you can’t accept it, then you have to do sculpture! You see, you have to do something about it. If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, then you have to re – create it. Which is what I have been doing.’

Bourgeois’s approach is compared to Annette Messager. In a 1990 series Histoire des Robes, produced in homage to her mother, Messager enclosed wedding (or first communion) gowns in coffin – like boxes, like sacred relics, the dresses are joined by memories and associations contained in drawings and photographs.

Annette Messager, Histoire des Robes, 1990

“Each replaces a body and alludes to its now – stilled movements. These works are emphatically mortuary, and, as do photographs, each prolongs a presence: a child with its fairy tales, a woman whose desire for physical movement is represented by photographed body parts, a mother with age inscribed in the lines on her hands and breasts.”

Messager’s methods recalls the writings of Brono Bettelheim, which she admires: he asserted that fairy tales have a psychological function for children: they gain an understanding of the world not only through rational comprehension of it but by imaginary experience. Messager mixes up ordinary objects with fairy tale concoctions like the Man in the Moon “and mythical characters such as the weaver Arachne to create a visual fantasia that cannot be interpreted rationally.”

“The fairy tales I love seem amusing and funny, but in fact they’re terrifying and cruel at the same time. I would like to achieve that kind of effect, and not out of cynicism but because I am caught up in my contradictions, in my fears.”

Messager thinks she is “always between fairy tales and popular religious images like ex votos.” which she is very fond of.

“In fairy stories the hero or heroine is thrown into serious danger at the very beginning of the story. It’s a magnification of real life in which the calm, friendly world can suddenly turn unstable, bristle with threats and dangers.”

Further on in the interview with Robert Storr, Messager proceeds with her discussion about fairy.

“I like these highly codified fetishistic rituals in which the hero has to find the foot to fit an abandoned shoe or gold ring. Everything is inflated, amplified, theatricalized. In fairy tales women can only be fairies or princesses, witches or wicked stepmothers, they always have to play highly codified roles like those I have attributed to myself.”

Messager incorporated a sense of fairy tale magic in her series Chimaeras (Chimeres) 1982 large “photographic composites” which have taken the shapes of the bogeyman. Chimaeras attract and disgust simultaneously.

“These installations are lurid and luxurious, oversize, overpainted, over theatrical, they breach ‘decorum and violate’ the integrity of both painting and sculpture with a hysterical disorder.”

Chimaeras are imaginary creatures that seem to belong in fairy tales, and are usually given a female personality or identity: bats; witches; bare and twisted trees; giant spiders and oversize objects, such a scissors and keys where size is threatening are combined with photographs of various body parts, blown up, torn, painted, mounted on canvas. Messager explains:

“For me, it’s a ‘natural’ gesture to rip bodies apart, cut them up…It’s also my desire to reveal scraps, fragments, instants of things; so that there are only a few precious traces, so that the viewer reconstitutes his or her own direction.”

Messager’s Chimaeras were specifically inspired by the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau’s 1884 ‘The Chimaeras’ Messager wanted to combine the fantastic and the horrific with imagery of daily life.

Chimaeras (Chimeres) 1982 - 84  

“In olden times when wishing still helped…”

Fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of years and first became what we call literary fairy tales towards the end of the seventeenth century. They offered themselves as one more pastoral entertainment for courtiers, pretending to be the work not of respected academics who sponsored them, but of the child and/or the nurse of the child. Very little has been written about the transition of the folk tale to the fairy tale, why this occurred and how. Historical and sociological studies have show that the fold tale originated as far back as the ‘Megalithic period, and that ‘common people’ have been the story tellers. Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fairy tales were and still are in third world countries, told to adults as well as to children. During the late nineteenth century the public could find stability in the ordered formula and structure of fairy tales. They could be taken from the corruptions of adulthood back to the innocence of childhood: from complex morality to the simple issue of good versus evil.  This comparable to the place where Annette Messager wishes to take us, which I will discuss later.

After the Grimm Brothers made their first collection in 1812, folk tales were gathered, transcribed and printed for the purpose of ‘establishing authentic versions’. The tales were often stylized or changed. A typical view of the emergence of Grimm’s fairy tales became a story as ‘charming and as loved’ as any of the actual tales; and just as permanent, and as immune to subversion by any consciousness of the facts of the real world. A common and fairly recent statement of that tale is that the Grimm’s, we are told, ‘spent most of their time wondering about the country, leaning from peasants and the simpler townspeople a rich harvest of legends, which they wrote down as nearly as possible in the words in which they were told.’

Is this just a fairy tale itself, appealing but untrue? According to John M. Ellis this is disappointingly so, it can be proven to be false, and a large part of published evidence has been attainable for over a hundred and fifty years, the rest completely unattainable for over fifty years.

‘Fairy tales for children as universal, ageless, therapeutic, miraculous and beautiful. This is the way they have come down to us in history inscribed on our minds, as children and then as adults.’

Gallery 21

Some of my work is being exhibited at Gallery 21, Salisbury.

https://www.gallery21.co.uk/artists/jennifer-mosley/107/?data_source=local