‘Every Fairy Tale has an epilogue’
Epilogue – a short addition or concluding section at the end of a literary work, often dealing with the future of its characters. Also called afterword.
An old wedding dress in a black plastic bin liner. I first began working on this piece in late 2008. I had been doing a lot of research and work around memory and the way that objects become cyphers for our experiences. So many of these objects, that we consider to be intimately connected to ourselves, personal, are in fact cultural artefacts that contain stories that are accesable to us all. It is the old thing that we are much more alike than we are different.
A wedding dress carries associations and meanings and has a particular place within our culture. From the moment we are introduced to fairy tales such as Cinderella, as a child, to the day we begin to plan our own ‘Big Day’, the image of a princess in a beautiful white dress holds a place and a meaning that almost anyone within our society understands automatically.
‘Every Fairy Tale has an epilogue’ initially existed as a performance piece. I wanted to subvert the assumptions that surround the dress. So instead of a ‘lovely young bride’ taking this incredibly special object out of it’s protective covering, the audience sees a very ordinairy middle aged woman carefully unpacking a wedding dress from a black bin liner while sitting in the floor. Stains have developed on the delicate fabric over the years, the woman wears no wedding ring so probably the marriage no longer exists. The fantasy begins to disintergrate.
It is just dress. A little old fashioned. And yet it contains so many memories and the very act of unpacking it resurrects those memories and simultaneously makes new ones.
More recently I have been working on creating an installation using the photographs of the original performance (photographs taken my Jo Clewes) and the dress and bin liner. I find the contrast between a once precious object and its storage in a black plastic rubish bag interesting and emotive.
