In my work, diverse sources – historical illustration, its offshoots in early advertising, postcards, or figurines, archival or contemporary photographs, 17th century genre painting, children’s drawings and other ‘figures’ – meet in paint grounds to explore or re-stage older narratives of transformation and desire, catastrophe, rescue, scarcity and excess – in a discursive, visceral wondering about history, representation, narrative, and experience in a changing physical and cultural climate.
Informed by research into how popular narrative images were reproduced and repurposed – including time spent in archives like Walter Benjamin’s children’s book collection as well as the ‘shrinking of experience’ and disenchantment wrought by capitalism and technology that Benjamin forecast, aspects of visual culture, memory and experience have been a through line of interests.
They include how early fairy tale tropes of children abandoned in the wood (like Le Petit Poucet or Hansel and Gretel) resonate with future generations abandoned to climate change and other threats, where it is left to a young girl with braids named Greta to lead the fight against the ‘fairy tale’ of unsustainable growth’ or foolish narcissistic, golden-haired would-be kings or princes.
Or 17th century figures like Puss in Boots, who reversed the fortunes of his peasant master during a time when the imaginative power of early fairy tale arose from a long period of hierarchy, primogeniture, sumptuary law, and scarcity – something we as socially mobile consumers of images and things can only dimly imagine. From a past where advancement was impossible, to one where it began to be achieved via commodities as social mobility increased, iterations of these figures found new roles marketing smaller changes in status through early advertising. Now, as social mobility and equality decline in countries like the U.S., and social media/technologies produce accelerated shock, alienation, division and reversals of expectation, it is hard to escape the feeling of moving back in time. What have been described as “unprecedented” developments in the time of Trump have precedents in fairy tale, its historical context and persistent, evolving images and narratives. Those left behind have few avenues other than wishful identification with otherwise unattainable wealth and power.
In my work, Puss in Boots figures from late 19th or early 20th century advertising may be transported from long ago fields of Carabas to far away global fields in the Indian subcontinent, early 20th century tableau vivant photo postcards of Le Petit Poucet appear in children’s drawings of forests or 1930s German Hansel and Gretel figurines find themselves in uncertain paint grounds.
Distinct from fairy tale’s narcissistic mirror, fable’s animals expressed enduring human characteristics and moral dilemmas dispassionately, holding a mirror to society as a whole. But as the physical, political and cultural ground has shifted, their ancient animal voices echo strangely and plaintively in the Anthropocene and against a ground of increasing polarization, disinformation, and anti-science, ‘populist’ narratives, making fable’s ancient discourse appear more sane and sober in contrast.
In recent paintings relating to fable, a dog may discuss freedom with a wolf or drop his meal in the river, transfixed in jealous self-reflection. A wolf may tell ridiculous self-aggrandizing lies to justify devouring a lamb whose truthful, factual replies cannot save it; dead hares from 17th century hunting scenes may be rotated to race with a child’s drawing of a tortoise or a composting, re-generating carapace, while FOX and the Stork are unable to share a meal.
While the work explores loss and the erosion of connective social tissue, integrative memory, and narrative, including the primordial narrative of reliable seasons, the act of piecing together small figures that hopefully bring with them something of their history is for me a way to visually work through representational material of the past to unearth some hope for the present.
© Carol Wainio 2025