The Voyage, Moondial & Vortex

‘The Voyage’

‘Moondial’

‘Vortex’

It is so hard for me to explain these new scenes; I really think that this time you may need to be sitting inside my head to fully understand! There is actually a fourth shot that belongs to this winding chain of unconsciousness that I haven’t finished yet, but hopefully you will see there is method in my madness. The last picture in this diary was ‘An Ocean of Tales Until the Shores of Home’, where a galleon ship sailed out from the heart of the book. It was meant to mark a new direction, and in recognition of that I wanted to create pictures in deliberate contrast to the previous scenes.

I turned day to night to dictate a darker tone after all the flowers of the summer. In my dreams there was a change coming, a storm brewing, and ‘Moondial’ embodies that for me. The midnight woods dissolving through the crystal ball into an inky abyss was symbolic of a spell, one that would affect the land and all the characters within it. Wonderland is ‘a storybook without words’, never fully explained. It has a sense of time passing, a journey through seasons, and a story you cannot quite grasp, yet it remains faintly familiar – like a collection of broken memories. I decided to embody this change by having one of the most extreme characters from the series, the Candy Cane Witch, put under a spell, as a metaphor for this shift. When I first imagined her, I always dreamt of this angry character furiously stamping through the woods in her jewelled costume, raging at the world for being ugly and alone. Like so many heroines, her misguided idea of happiness involved dreaming of becoming a more beautiful version of herself. Fairy tales often warn us to be careful what we wish for, especially when the gain is vanity, and it was this downfall of beauty that I wanted to address.

Colour is vital in my work, and life in general. I understand the world through shape and tones, rather than facts and figures, so it has become a language I use in everything I do. I have always connected red to the notion of travelling, the way a red carpet invites us to walk down it, as well as the obvious sense of warning we are all familiar with. I wanted this sequence to be linked through the physical element of colour, which envelopes its inhabitants, wraps them up and reappears through each scene like a giant thread that stitches each life together. This began with ‘Vortex’, where I shot the picture in a field from the top of a ladder, with Katie lying on the ground beneath me. I took metres of heavy red cotton and draped it in a giant circle, arranging the candy canes in piles, from big to small, to express a sense of perspective. I wanted her to appear to be falling through a spell, as if she was spiralling away from her old self in that tiny glass ball.

The following image ‘The Voyage’, was intended as her transformed state, gaining her wish to become the beauty she had always dreamt of, only with the cruel twist of becoming a doll in the process: a shallow object for display with bent joints and a hollow heart. I planned to continue this undercurrent in the pictures that followed these three, each being linked with red trails that slip through their frames. I suppose I needed to express more of the darkness in my heart. Sometimes the pictures are about me creating a happier place, when I’m well aware they aren’t reflective of where I am at in the real world. I never wanted this project to be perceived as just pretty girls in fields of flowers, and I think it’s fair to say this is largely responsible for me needing to push a more honest mood into the work I’m making. Maybe this was me shaking off the colourful crazy concepts; it’s been an escape and wonderful at times, but it isn’t always who I am right now. It’s hard to explain …

Costumes and Props

Regarding props and costumes, I have already shown all the pictures of the original Candy Cane Witch in previous entries. So for now here are the pictures of the props and wig being made for  ‘The Voyage’ . I had set my heart on trying to create a scene like a painting, and cutting corners with the props would ruin the mood. Instead I spent 2 weeks searching the Internet for antique horse toys. Finally I stumbled across an old bric-a-brack shop selling an unfinished toy makers carousel. Somebody had hand drawn the horses onto wood, and sketched plans for the rest of the construction but never finished it. The horses where filthy with missing legs in old paper packets…. they just felt so magical, I couldn’t believe my luck!

I repaired the horses, and tried to match up the missing legs.  I then painted them with a dark antique silver enamel. It took a long time to do, and I was worried about how difficult it was going to be to make this prop look how it appeared in my head….. but there was something so wonderful about finally finishing this mysterious persons project they had started so long ago. I wished I could tell them that I was going to make their horses come to life, and finally make them dance on a carousel after all those years sitting in the dust 🙂

Once all the horses and the toy carousel decoration were coated with the enamel, I sat down to decorate them with glass diamante stones. For the rest of the umbrella I wanted to make it look like the roof of a carousel, and ended up having to go to a vintage fair to buy antique silver military braid. It was expensive but was exactly what I needed to pull the whole idea together. I attached the carousel toy to the peak of the parasol, added more wooden strips, sewed on the braid, and ended with fixing the horses in position. It was a labour of love, but I was so glad I pushed through all the hassle to finish it.

Now the main prop was finished, I then had to work on the changes to the candy cane witch character – how she would look as her new ‘perfect doll’ self. Because her hair had originally just been an explosion of wild frizz I wanted to create something very controlled that would look almost carved. The idea of circus was already very clear in the characters concept, so I began thinking of juggling balls and performing ponies. I suppose the overall shape was a cross between the plaited mane of a circus horse, and juggling balls made of hair! Elbie and I agreed on covering balls with plaited hair extensions and then attaching them into Katie’s own hair with wire and more braiding. Elbie spent days creating all the plaits and then pinned them into coils the night before the shoot. For an extra sculpted look she painted dark lines in between the plaits to give them added depth.