Once Upon a Time

What is fairy tale? Where do the stories come from?What do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality and society?

The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time, their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis and feminism.

"It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things and events. The tales are older, simpler and deeper than individual imagination. It is odd when you come to think of it that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories.These flat stories appear to be there because stories are all pervasive and perpetual characteristic like language, like play.

There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life;their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good and if bad, they are bad.The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory , the promptings of half understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are entirely absent." A.S.Byatt

Fairytale narratives are dream-like; they are disjointed, brilliantly coloured, the overlook rational cause and effect, they stage outlandish scences of sex and violence, they make abrupt transitions without rhyme of reason.They also contain significant repetitions and recurrent symbols.

Behind the shiny gorgeous surfaces of fairy tales you can glimpse an entire history of childhood and family: the oppression of land owners and rulers, foundlings, drowned or abandoned children, the ragamuffin orphan surviving by his wits , the likeable lad who has his eye on a girl who is from a better class than himself or the dependence of old people.Unlike myths, which are about gods and super heroes, fairy tale protagonists are recognizably ordinary, working class people toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period in history before industrialization and mass literacy.

When the eldest son inherits everything the younger brother would set out on his adventures penniless, to return fabulously endowed .The genre's themes are real life themes and the passions real life passions:getting by and getting what you want, knowing the odds are stacked and that all might be lost.Luck is powerful but resourcefulness is praiseworthy. Unspeakable, unbelievable acts are also taking place.Terrible family violence:a father cuts off his daughter's hands because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her.Small children are damaged:Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents to die in the woods and so on.These acts contradict all ideas of natural feeling.But these  situations however horrible are echoed even now in the news.Starvation and infanticide are recurrent dangers and their victims devise ways of opposing them, avenging themselves on their perpetrators and of turning the status quo upside down.These plots convey messages of resistance-a hope of escape.

source- "Once Upon a Time" by Marina Warner

Stream of Consciousness in Visual Narratives

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts, inner monologues and feelings which pass through the mind. The‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique was first used by William James and become widely adopted as a term of art in literary criticism during the twentieth century, especially of the novels of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, or James Joyce, among others.
William James in his work, The Principles of Psychology, describes the nature of mental life, seeing things from within one’s mind. James thought of mind as an always changing continuous flow, which cannot be divided up by bits; he supported the idea that temporal separation can only distort the flow of mind.

In his study, William James explains consciousness by its major characteristics; he describes mind as an always private and individual affair, that thoughts belong to a person and are always in a flux, always changing. He claims that only objects can reoccur, but no thought or idea can be exactly the same twice. Therefore he sees consciousness as a constantly flowing stream, which is always liable to change.

By practicing this narrative method, Virginia Woolf not only creates continuity between different time zones and places, but also between the minds of her characters. She illustrates the relationship between reality and un-reality; between the exterior world and an inner world.

In her narration, Woolf constructs a dualistic existence by affirming both spiritual reality and physical reality. To experience the value of life Woolf weaves a tight connection between the dualistic impulses through which her protagonists can understand true existence.

Artists taking advantage of the stream of consciousness do not intend to introduce and follow a narrative; rather, they find a different kind of freedom in representation of the levels of their own unconscious and semiconscious minds and  create different works of art through visualizing their feelings and emotions , without already thinking about the end result or  the final design of the work.  The public relate to the work at various levels and formulate their own interpretations as this mode allows the addressees to have various perceptions and subjective mentalities which can be deemed popular and also unique at the same time. 

Sources:
James, William. The Principles of Psychology, Cosimo Classics, Inc., 2007.Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction” In: McNeille, Andrew, Ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

Creases, Pleats, Folds

Folding by hand is as low tech as any making activity can be. You are making something directly with your body without the intervention of third party tools such as pencil, mouse, camera lenses or needles. It is an almost unique making experience and perhaps unfamiliarly primal. This very basic, hands on activity especially in today's high tech studio environments can be very powerful and rewarding experience and cannot be considered unsophisticated or inadequate.

I have been slowly teaching myself the art of folding paper . I am addicted to the process and am amazed at the flexibility of paper which allows the transformation and the fluid movement of forms. I am curious to see how drawings on paper folded thereafter could lead to the fracture images or interesting distortions. At the moment I am enjoying taming the paper without thinking too much about the final outcome or the use of this technique.