"Full of life, alchemy, and mystery! " Exposure Awards
12th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Open Theme Series, Honourable Mention
On finding my childhood Ladybird book Cinderella and its stereotyped representations, my instinct was to burn it. As a photographer, I was compelled to photograph the process. To photograph an object in the process of immolation is to encounter both destruction and preservation within the fleeting moment. How might the fire provide a new context under which the narrative assumes new meanings and denotations?
Fire - a symbol of hearth and home, trial and purging prompts associations, which overlap the religious, secular and political. Traditionally, staring into the flames stimulates visualisation, imagination, creativity - even prophecy. The results were exciting, especially the way the smoke curled around significant figures in the images - as if knowingly.
Folklorists classify Cinderella as a ‘persecuted heroine’. In 1893, Marian Roalfe Cox estimated some 345 variants of the archetypal tale, evolving and migrating through space and time. The oldest recognisable version comes from China in the ninth century CE. I discovered that my instinct to use fire extracts latent content from the traditional Cinderella story. Early variations of the tale speak about the abuse of a young girl and her seclusion in which fire and ashes symbolise her ordeal and purification.
My series, ‘Cinderella: Your House is on Fire’ re-visions the illustrations into new works with new meanings, transforming the original depiction of the rites of passage trajectory to states of urgency. The image captions are changed to give agency to the heroine as she moves through the various stages thought necessary to heal abuse.