From the City into Trees
Dark Forest
In 1990 in a drawing class as part of my undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Visual Arts at City Art Institute, I produced a one-off book drawn book as part of my assessment. The book, titled From the City into Trees, was without text. The landscape depicted moved from the built city environment into the treed natural environment. I was never fully satisfied with the work. The treed environment should be greener and lusher offering a greater respite from the harshness of the city. Produced in a pressured situation for an assessment there was no time for reflection and re-visiting the work before it was handed in. After it was assessed I left it. Almost 20 years later the work was scanned and with the possibility of printing five smaller works were created.
Rebecca’s Diary
The starting point of this work was the Brothers Grimm story of Aschenputtel or Cinderella. My interest was in the part of the story that tells of the death of the girl’s mother and her life before the glamorous balls, the lost glass slipper and the romance with the Prince. I asked myself, if this lonely, unhappy child had written a diary what would she have written? Although it is a personal story it is also a universal story about growing up. The original work was developed, printed and bound 1990-1992.
In 2011 I revisited and extended the work called The Ashenputtel Trilogy. The stimulus was an invtiation to exhibit a work in the exhibition Happily Ever After.
