Next stop Antarctica : a journey through Tasmanian gothic to revisionist fairy tales

After reading Cape Grimm, I painted two children standing in front of a church, the boy cradling a fluffy white rabbit and the girl holding a falcon, surrounded by the lichen-stained gravestones, crushed-pink stone pathways, and wrought-iron fencing typical of Tasmanian country churches. In the background, stone devils squat on headstones and marble angels stride across others. A Tasmanian Childhood represents the synthesis of many of the ideas generated by exploring Tasmanian Gothic and Next Stop Antarctica. While the image functions primarily on an expressive level, its conceptual basis includes the interlocking themes of claustrophobia, Tasmanian history and trauma. The painting is informed by both readings of Tasmanian history, particularly Blood on the Wattle, and memories of growing up on an isolated island in the days before cheap airfares and the Internet. My aim was to create something that seemed both frozen in time, but capable of contemporary resonance, akin to revisionist fairy tales, a genre that I have recently become interested in. My interest in revisionist fairy tales—and, more specifically, the nexus between word and image and my twin practice as an artist and writer, led me to co-curate, with Caelli Jo Brooker, an exhibition of artists’ books with a fairy-tale theme. Titled Happily Ever After: Alternative Destinies in Contemporary Feminine Narrative, the exhibition brought together over seventy local, national and international artists and writers and asked them to work together to create new versions of traditional fairy tales, via the format of handmade books. My involvement in this exhibition can be traced back to the interest in Tasmanian Gothic triggered by Next Stop Antarctica, and the research process that underpinned the transformation of my initial album review into the UTS journal article.