by If you’re planning to take a child to the massive new Brisbane Fairy Tales exhibition, I suggest you go check it out first. How is your child bleeding, gnarly nails and inflatable sex dolls?
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Fairy Tales – now on display at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) – features more than 100 works of art, including sculpture, installation, painting, photography, animation, video art, and film props and costumes. Strange and wonderful as all cautionary tales should be, it’s exciting and very much aimed at adults – although we shouldn’t underestimate children’s appreciation of fear and wonder.
There is plenty of both in Fairy Tales, a show that traces the artistic history of European fairy tales and folklore – their kaleidoscopic fantasies and their eldritch horrors. Entering the exhibition, the white walls of the gallery begin to slide away and the branches of the trees push in with violence. A splintered, bulging wood installation by Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira forces visitors to avoid jutting branches while inhaling the sweet scent of freshly cut Brazilian plywood and locally sourced wood ash.
“The idea of the woods is that they are uncontrollable environments, and they push you to go in search of adventure,” says curator Amanda Slack-Smith. She points to Charles Perrault, the 17th century author considered the founder of fairy tales in the French court for his stories – including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Perrault, she says, considered the wood a metaphor for “bad intentions” lurking in the streets waiting for vulnerable young women.
Outside the forest, we see the oldest work in the exhibition, the Gustave Doré oil painting from 1862, Little Red Riding Hood, in bed with a wolf wearing a grandmother’s bonnet. It is the moment before he eats her. Along with American artist Kiki Smith’s 2002 feminist retelling of the same story, Born, a lithograph print with the little girl and grandma emerging from the wolf’s belly, unscathed.
A few steps away, two red concave mirrors by Anish Kapoor – a 2018 work titled Red and Black Mist Magenta – tease visitors.
“Woah, that’s too much,” said one woman as she rushed away. In reflection, your face might jump out at you – or suddenly you’re upside down or tiny, while other visitors lean back. You must stand very still if you do not want to fall. “Sometimes mirrors in fairy tales tell you you’re not worth it,” says Slack-Smith. She is not wrong.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the Witch House of the American artist Trulee Hall (Seance of the Umbilical Coven). It’s a full-sized hut covered in slimy black tree roots – or worms, perhaps. Visitors come in one at a time. “The artist says it’s a clubhouse for witches,” says Slack-Smith.
Inside it is lit with small flickering candles and decorated with black dreamcatchers, upside down baskets, black fur, more worms and, perversely, a black inflatable sex doll. A video shows unspeakable things coming out of an orifice; lore is in full swing.
It’s perhaps the most disturbing part of a show that’s already full of nightmare fuel: images of lost, sad children, long human hair with a mind of its own, poisonous mushrooms, or post-coital trolls enjoying a tender, sleepy spoonful.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of Fairy Tales are scenes from a child’s bedroom imagination. The giant Jim Henson puppets from Spike Jonze’s film Where the Wild Things Are (don’t even think about it) look great, and David Bowie’s costume from his 1986 film Labyrinth is also … great. “I’m pretty sure there’s some of his DNA in this suit,” says Slack-Smith. “Don’t tell me otherwise.”
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The most fun piece is a paper cut animation called You Were in My Dream. Made by Australian artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, it invites visitors to put their face in an oval hole, and immerse themselves in a series of short adventures. You are a child following an attractive rabbit through the woods, only to be transformed into a panting dog, and then a wolf and … dear. You can expect the worst but good things will happen too.
Play is woven throughout the exhibition. There are unsettling details from fairy tale movies – like the 27-kilogram wedding dress Julia Roberts wore in the Snow White Mirror Mirror adaptation, so heavy she hung her thighs trying to walk in it. Also of note is Patricia Piccinini’s installation Enchanted Field, a hanging garden in a powder-pink gallery full of delicate characters and mushroom rings.
I could have stayed in Piccinini’s room all day, but Cinderella left the next gallery – a silent black-and-white film of Cinderella that offers a more replicable view of fantasy. Released in 1922 by German animator Lotte Reiniger, it comes complete with blood dripping from the butcher’s feet to fit the glass slipper. In the same room, we see Hans Christian Andersen’s delicate paper clips and mischievous Pinocchio in his Y-fronts by the Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, as well as Del Kathryn Barton’s short but soulful animation The Nightingale and the Rose, featuring a delicate bird. with huge female breasts and rosy-red nipples he makes himself in love. Ouch.
These works have the duality of fairy tales; they are “provocatively guided or casually traditional,” says gallery director Chris Saines. “They were originally told to scare children from wandering into the forest in pre-industrial Europe but since then they have produced a series of big-budget films narrated by artists and storytellers and used to inform us us and to inform us.”
Like its subject, the exhibition is a dreamlike experience. Memories will drift away like moths, or you may end up feeling crazy like an old mirror. He may not be happy ever after but you could leave him transformed.
