With themes of obedience and disobedience, light and dark, now and then and lastly when; Amelia Johnstone’s work continues to explore fairy tales, and growing as her Alice self, she is uncomfortable and constantly shifting perspective. Amelia aims to champion the discipline of illustration; its importance, significance, its impact and purpose.
Amelia traverses morality through religion, folklore, fairy tale and fable examining growing at all stages: through childhood, teenage-hood, adulthood to old age; advocating her belief in the human imaginer inspiring a better existence which sits quite firmly in folk. She delights in theatre, in books and paper, and is dismayed and worried about the widespread use of social networking, the Internet, and the culture that she sees ‘consuming itself’.
Amelia’s current practice hopes to enable the periscoped perspective, through teaching and storytelling; understanding the significance of interior monologue and illustration’s ventriloquistic (her word) abilities.
Abstract: Once upon again… ‘There was a time and no time…’
The retelling of tales has so often been the pursuit of the illustrator, in order to reinvigorate and re-zeit stories. In this paper/performance I shall explore the incredible power illustration has to translate and retell stories from the Greek myths to Angela Carter and beyond. In an illustrated paper I shall conjure this exploring how the Fairy Tale remains in its own time and in no time, how illustration suspends time, traverses through it and maintains its own time out of time.
I shall ask questions regarding the nature and importance of story telling in the embellishment of culture, particularly un-intellectualised culture and ‘Folk Lore’. Concentrating on the passing ‘out of time’ in order to order time, through stories and rituals a pentameter through seasonal festivals and rites. Thus exploring the possible uses, philanthropic and otherwise of illustration in its translatable forms in places where the written word can sometimes be obsolete.
Citing cultural theorists Marina Warner, Bruno Bettelheim, Dr Robert Wallis, poets Raine Maria Rilke, Stevie Smith, and inviting puppeteers, theatre and theatre companies like ‘Kneehigh’, to explore the travelling story and how it can ventriloquilistically (my word) contain the illustrators’ voice manifesting itself in a multitude of fashions to explore truth, morals, teach lessons and bend imaginations.
‘The beautiful sensical faith that is folk’(my words) does not boom a voice loud and unwieldy but quietly cultivates good, through confronting evil, death, night, day, autumn, winter, summer and spring. ‘Wonder has no opposite’ (Warner 1996), through wonder the world becomes re-enchanted and enchanting; from the basic form the little becomes the more; and here the story grows, tendrils of poison and the elixir of continuing life.
NB: This paper will be delivered in part as performance and in part as academic paper in order to explore the idea, conjure the possibility and move towards understanding and further questions commandeering the voices of those present and past to intoxicate the spirit that is alive within the storyteller.
