Anna Gaskell-The Fiction of Fictions

When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole, she found herself in a land of non -sequiturs where reason is inverted and the unexpected , the rule.Always a pragmatic little girl , she could not fathom the bizarre events unfolding before her, particularly the shifting of scale of her own body.From one moment to the next she shrank to a fraction of her size and then grew to gigantic proportions.While confused and frustrated at the blatant illogic of her new environment,Alice never doubted its reality.It is through her self possession,her refusal to consider the possibility that this world is a product of her imagination that Wonderland can come alive for the reader.

Gaskell imbues her photographic narrative a mediation on Lewis Carroll's celebrated story with an ominous air. The sense of something ominous lurking at the surface however lush and jewel like the surface may be informs the series as a whole.But that is to be expected from fairy tales with their often perverse Brother's Grimm sensibility.The real twist in Gaskell's retelling of Alice in Wonderland a tale so well known that it forms part of our collective unconscious -lies in the replication of its heroine .Alice's double identity  adds a complex layer to the fiction .Are these two girls actually a pair of twins or rather the physical manifestation of a split personality?If the character of Alice imagines her own alter ego into tangible form, if she conjures up her doppelganger, how can the rest of the story be believed?The artist manipulates her narrative by embedding a fiction within the main fiction which throws into question the veracity of the tale.For each body of work, she stages evocative dramatic moments of a larger plot while simultaneously disrupting the transparency of their narrative.

Gaskell's fictions usually involve some form of deception they depend upon exaggerations lies, even crimes for their internal structure.Her stories circulate around processes of make believe from the innocence of childish games to the anguish of mental illness. Built from layers of untruth, they bring into focus the tenuous distinction between empirical reality and the imaginary. 


Gaskell's fictions are based on fictions.Her literary sources are often discernable but the work does not illustrate or interpret these narratives.Rather they invoke a tone or sensation specific to each source that can best be described in oxymoronic terms as "exquisite unease".In creating this effect over and over again,Gaskell's images evoke discursive strategies unique to a literary genre known as fantastic.Outlined by Tzvetan Torodev, this type of literature puts the reader into a state of ambivalence of not knowing whether the seemingly real characters portrayed are experiencing events caused by natural or supernatural forces.In these instances known boundaries between matter and mind dissolve leaving the body and its psyche susceptible to many transformative processes including multiplication of selves , the protraction or contraction of time, the distortion of space and the fusion of subject and object. Such phenomenon is common to the realms of madness,dreams and drug infused state of dementia.They are also synonymous with how infants perceive the world until they are able to differentiate themselves fro their surroundings.Its intonations of apprehension are present like fever invisible but unsettling and potentially destructive.As the corporeal manifestations of subconscious elements, personality traits and pathologies, these figures patently misbehave.In many of her more poignant and disturbing images they act out an individual 's most destructive impulses.

Anna Gaskell "Untitled 2" from "Wonder series
mouth to mouth resuscitation or suffocation ?