"Once Upon a Time...Artists and Storytelling" Embankment Galleries, Somerset House 26 June - 26 July 2009

One of my favourite childhood memories is lying on my stomach in the local public library reading The Orange Fairy Book by Andrew Lang - I'm still searching for a copy of that book even now, it was large in my eight year old hands and had an orange cloth binding - just the thought of that book and I'm back there deep within the worlds created by the Grimms, Perrault, and the Arabian nights. So when I saw that the Courtauld Institute had an exhibition on in the Embankment Galleries called 'Once Upon a Time...' I wanted to go. The exhibition was the culmination of the year long MA Curating the Art Museum course at The Courtauld and therefore jointly curated by those students led by Martin Caiger-Smith who was previously Acting Director at the Hayward Gallery. Artists have told stories ever since there have been stories to tell and artists to depict them and the first section of the show, Childhood Stories, about the link between illustration and text show was the personal equivalent to Lascaux cave paintings - the earliest attempt to make sense of the world around us based upon Snow White and Cinderella rather than the caveman's woolly mamoth. While not particularly groaning with Fine Art as such - although some particularly fine Paula Rego illustrations feature - the familiar Victorian Cruikshank and Crane prints of Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, Three Blind Mice and so on, lulls the audience into a cosy rememberance of times past and in fact a quick glance around at my fellow visitors to the exhibition on a wet Wednesday afternoon confirmed this - plenty of nostalgic smiles and contented sighs. Personally I would have loved to have seen a few Ladybird book illustrations in there too - my version of Snow White was Eric Winter's, not Walt Disney's. However, one of the strengths of this section of the exhibition was that the dark and almost gothic side to our childhood tales was emphasised instead of the ubiquitous cartoon versions.



And like all good fairytales and stories the exhibition took a turn to even darker things...the second section of the exhibition was devoted to personal mythologies. Rather than taking an obvious line and showing some William Blake drawings, the MA curators had chosen Twentieth century prints and contemporary video works. Oskar Kokoschka prints waited in atmospheric subdued lighting alongside the dark curtained doorways to Tracey Emin and Gillian Wearing videos.


Tracey Emin's film Why I didn't become a dancer brought up memories of Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes very strongly - this piece from 1995 is so much more than just Tracey from Margate telling us about her crap childhood as if she was on television with Jeremy Kyle. Unlike the fairytale Emin has built a successful career on her lack of vanity and a strong personal mythology which finds itself deeply rooted in our celebrity culture - Tracey as Cinderella.


Part of that same conversation is Gillian Wearing's Confessions which really does tread the same ground as Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer but with ridiculous disguises that remind one of the Channel 4 comedy show Bo' Selecta. The interesting thing about all these television resonances is that Wearing's piece - fully titled Confess all on video. Don't worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian dates from 1994 so this is a true case of life (or television) reflecting art.Kokoschka, Emin and Wearing are also part of the same conversation that Sartre championed in Being and Nothingness and that politicians, actors, pop stars and even shop assistants all buy into; that our past is what we make it and truth doesn't have to feature in that. The exhibition makes a strong case for our past as story, our lives as story and art to make sense of our lives and ourselves. Intriguingly all the curators of Once Upon a Time... are women and so often, certainly in Western tradition, women were the storytellers - Mother Goose and the Wise Woman. This exhibition scratches the surface of a fascinating discussion which certainly continued for me as I went home to get out my copy of Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber a wet afternoon in a gallery started out with me enjoying childhood memories and ended with dark thoughts about blood and beasts, just like all the best afternoons.

Writing and being rejected

Again it's been ages since I posted here - I've gone from being a regular blogger to a sometimes one and the only excuse I have is that I've been writing so much more elsewhere.

I've been trying to be very disciplined with myself and to follow the Stephen King advice of writing at least 1,000 to 2,000 words each day.

That worked for at least two weeks. I was very proud of myself.

My problem seems to be that life just gets in the way - kids to take to and from school and other places, parents who need dropping off at airports and hospital appointments, friends who have to be kept up with, animals needing vets, cupboards needing filling, wardrobes lacking shoes....

Try and keep writing through all of that!

But of course I do because that is what I do. It tends to be a bit haphazard and some days I get a few hundred words down and other days I don't. I do need to write more but haven't we all got things that we really need to get done?

I read on a website the other day about the idea of setting yourself a specific target within a particular time frame - nothing exactly earth-shattering in this, but it did resonate with me.

And it's no good whining on about not having as much in print as you'd like if you don't actually submit stuff to editors - no one knows you're there unless you tell them.

And what's the worst they can say?

Email is a fabulous invention - I can send off half a dozen poems and I never have to see or speak to anyone about it. When I receive my rejection emails I can weep silently into my coffee without anyone knowing the reason why.

At least they're sending out rejection emails now, I used to just be ignored so I guess I must be doing something right somewhere along the line.


And even including this particular image of writing says so much about my idea of Good Writing and the value I put upon it. It gives away my intentions and expectations for my own writing but most of all it shows how terribly romantic I am about writing.

The other day I was talking about Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence and I was saying how much this was my type of book because it reminds me of my earliest reading memories. I remember being taken to the library in my village and chosing a large cloth bound book of fairy tales. There were three that I can recall, one orange, one red and one yellow. Each contained stories from Grimms, Andersen or the Arabian Nights I think. I know now that these were the famous colour collections from Andrew Lang and in fact I managed to find an image of one of them - I found this on an auction house's site, the book is valued at around £50-£75 and dates from the 1920s - it's the same sort that I read as a child in the late 70s. It seemed old and smelled old even back then but that added to the precious nature of it. Thick yellowing pages and the smell of old wood and mushrooms.



And that's what keeps me reading and writing - I love returning to the world that was contained within those colourful books.