I am bringing an old post back because I wanted to review again the fabulous discussion on women's art, especially the work of Katherine Ace and the events that surround and shape the direction of women's lives. And re-reading it again, I still find it as fascinating and with much to offer as when we first tackled the subject. Please feel free to join this ongoing discussion in the comments below.
The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions and for the reader following them in print. Storytellers use repetition to shape the story and emphasize important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something, which is usually ignored by the third time. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, with the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, and the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.
Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, and clean an old woman's eyes. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world. And the last section becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and a new purpose.
Each section of the narrative — separation, initiation, return– is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance.
All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion — painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement:
"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."
And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:
"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold – like fabric, time, or paint – back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you – like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly…"
I find this description compelling — for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself — dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales.
The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden," "Six Swans," and "Many Furs." (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.
I also found the collection of Sicilian Folktales collected by Laura Gonzenbach, translated into English. They are amazing and she was quite interesting.
“The depth is in the surface (oddly)”
have spent this lifetime wondering whether it’s shallowly deep or deeply shallow…
True that! It is one of the strengths I think of the art and of the fairy tale (especially when it was performed as part of an oral tradition). How many times might we hear those stories, how many different performers shape them slightly differently, but the surface of the story is the same. And yet, that familiar surface allows the story teller to use her voice and body in a unique way to create an evocative and emotional reaction from her audience. Each person’s life is different — a child hearing Tattercoats reacts differently than the grandmother hearing for the millionth time, over many points in her life. They will enter the story with a different set of needs. Elderly story tellers in South Africa’s Xhosa villages will tell the same stories they tell to young women to each other — the nuance of their voice, they way they might choose to linger on a detail of a familiar surface, or add in more cultural information, all goes to rediscovering something of the journey made as a young woman from an older woman’s perspective. I think that’s why I so love what Ace said — even a body water on its surface does not reveal if it is shallow or deep until you lean in, past your own reflection.
Wildly, wonderful profound and gorgeous. Bookmarking to return to again and again.
here’s one of my favourite pieces of writing from The Page by Margaret Atwood (Murder in the Dark Coach House Press 1983)
“5. The question about the page is; what is beneath it? It seems to have two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing , you say, disappointed.
But you’re looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.
The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?
Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it’s as if you’ve drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens up, a thin incision. Darkness wells through.”
isn’t that deliciously tempting?
oh my goodness MC — this is utterly fabulous. Thank you so much for sharing this passage. All the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I am completely taken by the almost mystical way we receive words on a page and how they move us, and how story telling performances also capture our emotions through the evocative images and the performer’s art in creating that moment above and below in the story.
Dang…I am running back to my shelves to revisit the very brilliant Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy” a slim volume that investigates just this idea. Thank you again!
haven’t heard of that one you have whetted my curiosity!
ok…went to Ong, found Lorca on my shelf instead…post coming up…
Hi Midori, I just found your blog after reading an article on fairy tales from France by Terri Windling, then I searched for her blog, then yours. I’ve now read several articles from both. I’ve translated a few old French fairy tales that were not already out there, or were out there in an incomplete state. Some have been published and are available either free online or in pay-to-read journals. Now I’m wondering if there were any of Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories that were never translated into English, or any by her contemporaries, and would like to ask if you know of any. Were there any that weren’t included in Jack Zipes’s collection?
I also must say that your blog is a feast for my eyes and mind and has made my day better. Thanks.
Hi Trish, thank you for your kind words about my blog! I am afraid I don’t know much about any remaining untranslated stories from her collections. There are so many translations out there available from Surlalune’s selections to the few that Jack Zipes references. I would say this however, that when it comes to reading in translation, there is a wide range of skill and emphasis in the translators. I have three separate translations of my father’s poetry books from French to English — and it is amazing to read the subtle differences in the text which reveal a lot about the translator’s relationship to my father and his work. This is a long way of saying that new translations are always welcomed.
Those are thoughts that I like, as you know, but I find they are especially odd to read now, when we are in a time that refuses to acknowledge forgiveness, refuses to acknowledge the idea of any redemption for past sins, any sort of rebirth, and that attacks and attempts to oust people permanently from their place. Perhaps we need these stories more than ever.
And now I’m going off to look at her pictures.
Spent some hours yesterday on Evelyn Williams’s art and words… Very curious mind. And sorrowful.
Hi Marly, I totally agree with you as we seem to live in age when one is either “acceptable” or pick your favorite insult. There seems to be only a “present” and if you fail to represent in this moment, you are deemed unworthy. Yes, the old stories we need them more than ever.
I saw your tweet about her and was planning to stop by and spend some time looking at her work. I admit, I have a fondness for the sorrowful, I think I trust it more than happiness (though I welcome it as well.)
hi, katherine ace here. i would be very very interested in your translations! i’m about to start a new series titled ‘down is up – hidden tales’ and am casting about for source materials. my email is kat@katherineace.com. put something notable in the subject line please. thank you. kat
Midori, i just found this. THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING! you don’t know how rare that is. i’m wading in the US fine arts culture and it is not about what you are talking about. yet i have not been able to avoid it in my artistic or personal life.
i’ve very rarely felt like someone looking at my work gets ‘it’. i don’t quite know what ‘it’ is, but you seem to have a good bead on ‘it’ in english. my language is visual and i get ‘visions or images’. but my personal life has been rather difficult, wild and oddly transformative. now, i have many loving relationships.
I love paint. it is a shared reality for me. paint is just flax oil or oil infused alkyd resin with pigments. pigments are dirt, minerals, modern pigments, rocks etc. earth. reality. our home district. heh.
when painting these images i am lost, completely lost, in time and space. it is a ‘losing time’ zone and i am only disturbed by the need to pee. damn pee. i think you and your readers know that zone well. we all have access to it, but something prevents us.
so thank you again for your writing. it has inspired me that i’m not just ‘out there’ alone and have people i can ‘talk’ to.
this, for me, has been such a lonely journey. from the start in my childhood. i’ve been presented with family serial murders (of beloved family members – girl cousins when i was 10), abuse snd coldness (which is worse) rejection by family, rejection by peer loved ones, and decades of serious health issues and pain – physical pain. only the young ones love me. my family peers hate and reject me for no apparent reason. the young ones love me. i finally reached my mother and father and stopped their hate and turned it to love.
i feel like i am living some sort of fairy tale. i feel like others see me as a character. but i’m just me. invisible and denoted as a character.
and yet i have painting. i’ve worked for decades to master painting. it is my ‘zone’. i’ve never questioned it, and that seems to have enraged some people, mostly in my family.
but to sit down in front of a completely blank canvas in my studio is the most scary and inspiring thing. i can rise to the challenge. in my own space.
this is how i created these images/paintings. partly as divinely inspired and equally defiant.
Aargh, my internet is down and I can't reply as I would wish on my phone. I am hoping it will be resolved today.
Katherine, I wonder sometimes if there isn’t often a connection between a less than stellar childhood and a deep dive into the arts. I left home at 16, not because my parents were cruel or mean — but because they had left me earlier. When I was five and my brother eight, we were eating cereal alone together, and my brother in all his eight year old wisdom turned to me and said, “now that you can pour your own cereal don’t expect anything from our parents. We’re on our own now.” We used to say, it wasn’t that they didn’t love us, rather they loved themselves more.
And while it was a most alienating childhood, and adolescence, I started writing even then, not to remake the world into something I lacked and desired, but because it was a world that belonged entirely to me and my own imagination. In order to graduate high school early (I had purchased a one way ticket to go to England) I had to write an essay on where I saw myself in the future. I wrote about 5 pages debating whether I wanted to be an actor or a writer. And then started laughing at the end of it, realizing that an actor would never waste so much time talking about acting, but a writer never stops writing about writing.
Your white canvas, and my white sheet of paper. I am always stunned by where the work takes me, where the ideas arise, and the images, but it is one of the few things in my life that I trust will be there, arising out of seemingly nothing, and then quickly becoming all consuming. Even now, as I am revising my previously published works (always written in haste with a baby on my hip) I am constantly surprised by things I have written–as you say, divinely inspired and equally defiant.
Katherine,
I am more poet than visual artist although I do some … My poems have been private, mostly, but seem to be calling themselves incantational ..
I see that in your paintings as well — the balance and the lyrical space blending together to not just tell a story but to insist. Am I off?
I also had a childhood of mostly benign neglect and some horror and I think it has made me open to other explanations of life ….
and thanks Midori for the original post — I vaguely remember reading it once when new ..
Isn’t there something lyrical in the world that is changing?
Some day we will have a cup of tea and sit down and recount our strange childhoods that made us (made us!) into makers…
Thought of this, reading your comment to Katherine Ace:
“Understand that you have within yourself, upon a small scale, a second universe: within you there is a sun, there is a moon, and there are also stars.” –Origen
Midori, yes you got the word. trust. from your words here i’d say you are a great writer and story teller. is there some way i can get/see more of your work?
Awesome! Thank you Katherine. I am going back to reading more of Harold Scheub’s work on oral natives — there is still so much to learn from his writings. I hope in the near future to add more…
M
Here are two Zipes translations of Laura Gonzenbach’s collections of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales. Both are magnificent.
https://tinyurl.com/2p97rbsu
tinyurl.com/23nzk7c4
These are links to the works of Laura Gonzenback, translated by Zipes.
Yes! Jack Zipes translated two magnificent books: Beautiful Angiola and The Robber with the Witches Head. Both books are still available on Amazon.
Yes!!! Tea and time to sit somewhere beautiful and talk and talk…
M
Hi Katherine — my work these days is pretty much in transition. I was a published author on the low rung of a fantasy publishing house. My work wasn’t edited, and it was despite the dismissal by the company, I am delighted by young adults and adults, who still read it and call for new books. I wrote one huge novel called The Innamorati — “The Lovers.” It’s a novel of food, sex, love, and trials and tribulations in 16th century Italy. It is my favorite book, and it won an award. But it too suffered for a lack of an editor. All of which I now have — a fabulous editor to go eventually through all my novels, and a terrific cover artist. I formed an LLC publishing house “The Leaping Hart” that is all mine and I hope publish, not only my work in the future, but that of other promising and established authors. I have a learned a great deal about publishing books and it brings me a lot of joy! (and late nights, thinking!!)