I have been working with the idea of having the wolf be apart of Alice rather than Alice behaving like the wolf. This lead me onto experimenting with collaging my own drawings to create new compositions. My original idea was to have the woman’s ’ponytail’ also be representive of the wolves tail, her vagina actually being the wolves mouth and her menstration red tongue of the wolf.
Like many social theories my anthroology research got me reading about Freud’s theories. Freud decribes sexual predatory behaviour in humans as the ‘ID’ He defines this stucture of the psyche the “unorganized part of the personality structure which contains the basic drives. The ID contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality. The ID acts according to the “pleasure principle“, seeking to avoid pain or displeasure aroused by increases in instinctual tension.“
These principles and the quote from an essay on the author Angela Carter about the story ‘Snow Child’ helped inspire my latest collages. For me representation of the importance of menstration within womanhood has become increasingly significant in my illustrations, before I had been representing ‘Alice’ as an adult who is already comfortable with her own body. The vulnerability in my latest illustrations has proberbly enforced the idea of Alice being a child entering womanhood and going back to primitive instincts; these instincts are then shown to be a natural part of humans even after being raised in a civilised society (as confirmed by the ID theory) I have begun to slightly reverse the principles of the story Wolf Alice by combining quotes from both stories to illustrate my on interpretation “she is just on the cusp between woman and child, with very fine hair and scarlet and white cheeks”
I am playing with the idea of the little girl dressing up, showing her innocence, naiviety and excitement of becoming a woman, the ‘bunny ears’ behind the head are another way of showing this metamorphse.
