We’ve received some exquisite proposals for the open section of Happily Ever After, and with the closing date of the open section fast approaching, we’re expecting some great ideas from this section too. Some highlights include:
- Cousins Linda Swinfield (visual artist) and Susan Hampton (writer) are collaborating on a story about the three furies, goddesses of vengeance in the underworld, who decide to take a holiday and end up staying in a Sydney youth hostel instead. Surf, sun, backpackers and… lethal women.
- Despite the fact that they have never met, and live on opposite sides of the globe, Newcastle’s Tallulah Cunningham (wildlife illustrator and fantasy artist) and London based writer Rick Kellum are working together to create illuminated manuscripts of his short story Aiken and the Dream Islands.
- Susan and Michael Hall-Thompson are busily creating a modern day fairytale that uses the Mills and Boon novel as its starting point. (Have you heard the joke about M and B creating a new verb? It’s ‘to hard’ as in ‘she felt him hard against her). ‘There is a Mills and Boon novel sold every 6.6 seconds’ writes Susan, adding that the images would subvert the romance genre by showing ‘women caught in the everyday’.
- In the 1980s Monica Oppen ‘completed a book which was the diary of Cinderella, but it was a prequel of the Brothers Grimm story’. Challenging both the linear perspective of traditional fairy tales, and the effortless finality of the phrase ‘happily ever after’, Monica is now writing a sequel and also a much later diary. We can’t wait to read them!
- Working with Hans Christian Anderson’s Red Shoes, Angela Gardner is contemplating an altered book that plays with notions of discipline and punishment, ‘a visual representation of destructive, all consuming desire’.
Thank you all: we’ve loved reading the proposals and look forward to seeing the books!
To keep in touch, we're setting up a page on Facebook (details to follow). When it's up and running, please feel free to ‘like’ or ‘share’ our page, post images, suggest links or references, leave comments or send us material for either the Facebook page or the blog. Caelli and I recognise that being an artist or a writer can sometimes be an ‘isolated and eccentric’ pursuit so we’re keen to use social media to share the story of everyone’s creative process, and on a practical level, to promote the exhibition.
To date, we have confirmed the participation of the following artists, bookmakers and writers: Lezlie Tilley, Deborah Williams, Emma Van Leest, Patricia Wilson-Adams, Monica Oppen, Angela Gardner, Caelli Jo Booker David Hampton, Helen Hopcroft, Pamela Poulson, Karen Robinson Smith, Rick Kellum, Tallulah Cunningham, Pamela See, Donna Townend, Tony Flowers, Amanda Watson-Will, Samara McIlroy, Gillean Shaw, Lisa Pullen, Nicola Hodder, Linda Swinfield, Susan Hampton, Yvette Sullivan, Anne-Maree Hunter, Kris Williamson, Emily Hitchcock, Alison Smith, Wayne Thompson, Sarah Mould, Grant Hunter, Graham Wilson, Ileana Clarke, Gianna Fallavollita, Taryn Raffan, Breony Delforce, Eleanor Jane Robinson, Stephanie Kaul, Mandy Robinson, Don Brooker, Vanessa Bowden, Jillian Coulton and Anne Godfrey.
