The Nutmeg Princess Now Lives Underwater in Grenada (& A Brief Discussion of 'Story Forensics')

You've likely seen some of the incredible sculptures from this underwater park in Grenada around the place. The statues have been designed to promote coral growth and are now ecosystems themselves, in fact it would be accurate to say the statues together are a living, artificial reef. (If you visit and dive to see them, please don't touch! Just pose and selfie. ;)

It should be noted that the diver and artist-sculptor who creates these eco-encouraging art pieces (and is doing amazing things to battle our rapidly disappearing coral reef systems around the world), is specifically attuned to both the historical and the folkloric aspects of "Spice Isle', in fact, he calls those topics a 'passion':

Known as Caribbean’s ‘Spice Isle’, Grenada has much to offer its visitors, especially seagoing tourists, from amazing forest reserves to picturesque waterfalls to a vast array of gorgeous white sandy beaches to name but a few. But what draws more and more visitors from every part of the globe year after year is the stunning-and-unique-of-its-kind Underwater Sculpture Park –the newest attraction of the island’s beautiful shallow waters, based on the original sculptures of the famous British sculptor and diver Jason De Caires Taylor, who has a special passion for creating fantastic pieces of work showcasing Grenada’s history and folklore. (Travelvivi)

I couldn't resist showcasing some examples. Click on the images to see them full size:

 

 

 

The newest sculpture was just, um, 'planted', less than a month ago and now that the dust, er, sand, has settled and the local sea life is becoming acclimated, these beautiful photos are starting to appear online.

Nutmeg Princess almost ready to be 'put to bed'

From Travel Weekly:

The Nutmeg Princess statue has been added to Grenada's Underwater Sculpture Park at Moliniere Bay, just north of the capital of St. George's on the southwest coast of the island.
The 11-foot-tall statue joins 100 sculptures at the park that opened in 2007 and serves as an artificial reef that forms a substrata for the growth of marine life.
...The Nutmeg Princess depicts Grenada’s first fairy tale princess emerging from a large nutmeg pod and reaching to the heavens with a handful of the spice Grenada is known for.

This is not from a traditional tale - well, not exactly anyway. The Nutmeg Princess is a 'well-loved classic' folktale written in 1992 (yes, very recently!).

The story goes like this:

The idea for the story was the result of a school visit where a little girl put up her hand and asked if (author, playwright and storyteller) Keens-Douglas knew a story about a black princess. At the time, he didn't, but it was all he needed to inspire him. 

You can go debate about whether it's possible to write a 'real' 'new fairy tale' or not, but for the record, I'm on the side of 'absolutely it's possible - rare, very rare, but possible'. Almost always the ones that stick are grown out of older stories, with the storytellers/writers well-rooted in folklore and tales, and while most 'new' tales are really just variations, I do believe that sometimes, there might just be a new one...

I don't know enough of the pattern markers to 'measure' how old a specific tale really might be (whether the writer knew that or not) and I don't have a 'story-forensics* & lexicology' database that casts a wide enough net to track it either in the multiple classification types, but there are 'tells'. For instance, at a quick read through, this tale feels like a repurposed myth, but I've also read a range of Caribbean tales and know the boundaries between myth and fairy tale are a little more blurry in this part of the world than we're used to.


Does that mean it's not new? Although unlikely, the answer really is 'No'. Because there's that sliver of possibility that it just might be. New-but-familiar is that extraordinarily elusive combination that many artists, from writers to musicians, strive for, with many never knowing whether or not their 'successes' are truly new or not!

What a brain stretcher. I'd like to hand this over to a PhD candidate please!

In the meantime, all those who would like to join me in cross-checking the story-forensics database, please put on your geek gear, ink your tattoos, bring your uber-hack skills and wear boots and your ATU credentials. I'll meet you in the lab, where the cool soundtrack is. (Note: We do accept tweed if you can 'bring it'.) Oh yes - and be prepared for lively debates... ;)

Note: I now have a yen to re-read Seanan McGuire's Indexing... man I wish that series had kept on going! Just adore the concept and have a feeling it was just a teensy bit ahead of its time.

*Yes - forensics: you can't tell me you haven't thought how people use and twist fairy tales can't be considered a crime from time to time! ;)

Kirsty Mitchell's Fairy Tale "Wonderland" London Exhibition Begins (And A Book On the Way!)

Big news for Kirsty Mitchell fans:
1) she's having a 'selling exhibition' starting TODAY (May 7th) in London for 2(ish) weeks, featuring gorgeous 2 meter prints (6 foot prints for the non-metric folks), that show all the teensy details in each amazing shot

2) she also aims to have a book available of her Wonderland work by the end of THIS YEAR! (ie hopefully ready for Christmas!)

By the end of 2015, she hopes to realize a 'Wonderland' book in collaboration with esteemed British book designer Stuart Smith through the launch of a campaign on Kickstarter backed by the photography platform LensCulture.

(I can hear you cheering from here!)

But back to the exhibition. Here are the details from the press release. I'm including the biography and summary notes about Ms. Mitchell and how this series came to be, for those who don't know much about her work:

Kirsty Mitchell ‘WONDERLAND’

7th – 23rd May 2015

Mead Carney Fine Art, 45 Dover Street, W1S 4FF

The show is kindly sponsored by Nikon UK.

Mead Carney is pleased to present 'Wonderland', a new selling exhibition by award winning fine art photographer Kirsty Mitchell.

'Wonderland' is a project created over the course of five years as an homage to the artist's mother who tragically passed away in 2008.

Having worked in fashion for a number of years, Kirsty understood the constructed and filmic nature of the photographic image. Building on this, she incorporated childlike whim through the creation of her favorite fairytales that her mother read to her as a child. With minimal support and finances, she built what can be likened to a film set in order to stage each frame. The tailor-made dresses and make-up add an element of high fashion into the work. However, props such as ships, headdresses and books transform the image further; each item carefully built and placed so as to convey a personal sense of imagination.

Kirsty's oeuvre is whimsical and dream-like. It consists of over 70 photographs that intertwine fantasy, literature and personal mediations. The selection presented shows the breadth and complexity of the highly constructed artworks. The highly saturated colours give a vivid, fairytale quality to each image. Intense contrasts intensify the surreal quality of each work; reality is undermined by the lack of gravity and soft lighting.

Upon completion in November 2014,  'Wonderland' immediately won 2 international awards, with over 280,000 followers on its social media. It has been extensively featured throughout the world achieving a viral status online, and has been published by prestigious names such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue Italia, The Guardian, BBC news, Germany's Spiegel Online and Stern magazine to name but a few. The images warranted coverage from BBC News, Italian Vogue, and Polish Harper's Bazaar, to name a few. She won a number of awards including the grand prize for visual storytelling by Lensculture in 2014 and a place as the Nikon Ambassador of Fine Art Photography. 

I had to include one of her wonderful behind-the-scenes videos, which I highly recommend for fans, photographers and storytellers alike:

I'm also linking you to her video behind-the-scenes of prepping the ENORMOUS prints for this exhibit. Just amazing stuff. You can watch it HERE, along with finding out extra details about the gallery, the Wonderland show (what will and what will not be shown - only some is shown in the panorama shots below) and her note to fans about the upcoming book.

For those of us who can't see the exhibition, you can see the series at Mitchell's website HERE. And while you're there, I recommend checking out her other galleries too. Some of her personal portraits are truly stunning. (I've also collected a variety on a Pinterest board HERE, along with costume shots and behind the scenes pics, since these photos wouldn't be what they are with all Mitchell's artistry in design, costume and prop making - that's right - she designs and makes them all herself!)

And we'll be keeping our eye on Kickstarter for the rest of the year and cheer this book on to get published. I'd love to see more about the stories behind the photos - not just how the photos were made but which stories told her by her mother inspired which pieces. Clearly there is a fairy tale sensibility here as well as a 'modern-Victorian' faery atmosphere as well, which I would love to hear more about.

And then there's the future. If this is where she journeyed to creatively over five years, we have to wonder: just what amazing things will she do next?!

Film: "The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga"

I've been hoping I'd find a way to see this film so I could post on it properly but I can't see that happening for a while yet so it's high time I let you all know about it, in case you get the chance to., especially since a trailer was uploaded just a few weeks ago.

Note: all artwork, animation and photography in this post is from the film, production blog or official website.

It definitely seems to me that witches of the fairy tale kind in general are having a come back and that includes Baba Yaga. Though this film was released in 2013, it's making the critic rounds right now and the response has been overwhelmingly thumbs up.

Independent filmmaker Jessica Oreck has a name you may have heard of if you're in film and indie film circles. She's the creator of that curious and very different entomological film "Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo". While "Baba Yaga" is being touted as even more experimental due to use of mixed media using aspects of animation to blend two stories together, the familiarity of Baba Yaga and her stories might mean it's more accessible to people like us. All I've read about the film, themes, synopsis and treatment seems far more straight forward than "Beetle Queen" to me but then I'm someone who finds is quite comfortable with the mention of flying pestles and huts with chicken legs...

How's this for an intriguing introduction?

Deep in the forest, wedged in cracks in the bark and under the moss covered rocks, hide memories and myths. These subconscious tales, drawn from the natural world, inform the societies we build. Jessica Oreck's fantastical work combines animation, traditional storytelling and contemporary non-fiction filmmaking to recount the Slavic fable of the Witch Baba Yaga. Directed by Jessica Oreck.

I also love the summary/explanation at the official website, presented in lovely book form:

Variety just posted a really interesting and informative review of the film a couple of days ago, which was a nice surprise. Here are some excerpts:

Nature and civilization square off in Jessica Oreck’s poetic meditation-cum-documentary “The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga.” Alternating between two complementary narratives (fairy-tale and cultural-anthropological) in two languages (Russian and Polish) and two formats (animation and live-action), Oreck spins a mesmerizing web that appropriates a wealth of disparate Eastern European images — of mushrooms, farmers, falling trees and war-destroyed buildings — to illustrate its lyrical discourse.
The story Oreck tells is simple: Man, fearing nature’s wildness, builds walls against it and demonizes it in folklore. But there is another, far more violent force within man himself that, once unleashed, sends him fleeing to a wilderness that now affords sanctuary. 

...Oreck’s version of a well-known Slavic fairy tale replaces a wicked stepmother with hostile soldiers as the reason two children must venture into the woods. There they encounter Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch who flies around in a giant mortar and lives in a movable hut mounted on chicken feet. She demands near-impossible tasks of the sister and brother, threatening to eat them if they fail. But, aided by small representatives of nature — a talking mouse, cat and sparrow — the duo accomplish her bidding. Foiled, Baba Yaga must allow the children to leave, reluctantly giving them a magic comb; fleeing marauding soldiers, the boy throws the comb on the ground whereupon it transforms into an impenetrable thicket.   The siblings wander in the forest where they are reunited with their mother and all live happily ever after.
Oreck presents this fairy tale as a series of animation storyboard panels, rendered with 3D perspectives. Though these illustrations do not literally constitute animation — there is no frame-by-frame character movement linking one drawing to the next — the camera simulates storytelling by constantly roaming the panels, zooming in and out and slowly panning across surfaces.

The Polish monologue, borrowing freely from evocative poetry, musings and memoirs, encompasses a far less cohesive procession of live-action images.... 

You can read the whole review HERE.

The juxtaposition of the animation images (including those shown here) and the more documentarian-style live action scenes sounds like it would come across as very experimental, especially while watching, it seems the resulting feeling is a successful melding of the two mediums to tell a cyclic story of man vs nature and man vs man as well as nature vs society.


If so, that is exactly my impression of what it would be like to face Baba Yaga: terrifying, confusing, a personification of all things scary and fear for your life, only to realize later that she made more sense than the places and people you originally thought of as being safe because she is bigger than just a person and has a bigger purpose, whereas much of what you took for granted as being safe before, no longer is. Where you thought you were facing death in the forest, you learned to live. The world of man (and war) doesn't work like that at all - it's almost the opposite - you fight to live, only to be faced with death on many levels everywhere you go.


Clearly this is a film that is more at home in an Arthouse theater than a mainstream one (and not just because it's foreign) but then people who are drawn to fairy tales often have eclectic tastes so there's likely more than a handful of you who find this as intriguing as I do. The reviews are by-and-large people being happily surprised and drawn in more and more by the film as it goes along, when at the outset they expected to just 'survive' it for critical review purposes.

Here's the trailer, which shows the use of live action against tale-paced words. Though the animated images illustrating the fairy tale are missing, there's no doubt about the content.

Some additional recommended reviews and related articles:

• Unseen Films - Review
• Michelle J. Enemark Talks About doing the Animation For the Film
• Twitch Film: Baba Yaga... A Ravishing Meditation on Our Relationship With Nature - Review
• The Film's Production Blog
• "The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga" - Official Website

Fairy Tale News New Year's Bumper Edition: Weather & the natural world

• Act now to save our birds Birds have always been endowed with symbolic portent – from Chekhov to Hitchcock to Twitter. We ignore their decline at our peril. There are glimmers of hope, but only if we act now (Article by Margaret Atwood on the importance of birds from myth, to history to today, their decline and what we can do. She originally wrote the essay On Souls As Birds' from Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, which this article echoes. Again, via The Fairy Tale Cupboard)

• Cleveland Metroparks Zoo (Ohio, USA) is having a "Fairytales & Frogs" themed event on February 15th, 2010 - kids under 12 in costume have free entry to the Zoo and Rainforest that day. "Not only will guests learn about the importance of frogs, but they’ll also celebrate the special role these amphibians have played in fairytales and legends throughout history. " (I wish I could go to this!) Additional info: "Everyone can get nose-to-nose with frogs during Get-Close Encounters and decipher myth from reality by talking with the Zoo’s frog keepers. Other activities include a frog craft, storytelling and an interactive life-size “Frogger” game that teaches the importance of frogs in our ecosystem and addresses the perils that frogs face in the wild due to pollution, climate change and habitat loss."

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