Laura New
Artist & Illustrator
Dystopian Fairy Tales
Whilst reading the very first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from 1812 in which the stories are without embellishment and have tragic, grotesque and gruesome endings, I began a series of drawings of storybook scenes where the visual elements exist before the tale.
Fantastical beasts contemporary cultural references, Jurassic pets, circus ‘freaks’ and nostalgic children's toys thrown together to create static snapshot narratives that hint at moralistic fables amidst chaos and total nonsense.
These drawings are a little lost. Their stories are incomplete or don’t exist at all, woven into family portraiture of the past or stuck in a nonsensical part of their story. Some are silly, and others are twisted with nostalgia. As with the original tales that the brothers Grimm collected, they are meant for adults but retain a childlike simplicity beneath which exists darker details that make them a little uncomfortable.
It’s become an obsession to tinker with the narration of the characters and as they grow in number, I am able to introduce them to each other by way of digital collage creating bigger landscapes of narrative. I’ve begun to add story as a secondary aspect, feeding off the visual element rather than the other way around. The book ‘Dysfunctional Family and other dystopian tales’ will be published in 2021.