Memory & Muchness

Illustrations For The Adventures Of Alice
In Dark Wonderlands &
Shattered Looking Glasses

"The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: "That begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-you know you say things as 'much of a muchness' - did you ever see such a thing as drawing of muchness?" "

Alice In Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll are timeless classics of literature, enchanting tales for children, and mysteries for adults that are often re-imagined as cute and frivolous stories and locked away in attic trunks of our recollections and fond remembering's.
If we take them out and dust them down a little, and open our eyes to them with all the knowledge we have accumulated over the yawning years of mature disenchantment, we can discover the shards of tales we never saw within these books when we were younger and the world seemed a little brighter.
Echoes of myths of other lost girls in darker underworlds, ancient Persephone's that call to their arms a multitude of innocents that time has dragged (sometimes rather harshly) into newer times. Fragments of universal archetypes that wink at us knowingly from the pages.
Amidst the shadowed mythologies are clustered haunting songs from our dreams and nightmares, our phobias and insecurities. They shimmer and twist reflected in the texts as if they were a looking glass in themselves. And perhaps they are.
Lewis Carroll drew from the world around him and wove it into his stories, and we can still do the same with them today-we can see in the characters reflections of ourselves and the world we live in. Tweedles and axe-wielding monarchs cavort in the murky halls of politics and world affairs, White Knights crusade against injustice with weak promises and fading hopes. We all engage in bizarre restructuring's of what we believe to be true; re-painting reality like rosebushes we find to be the wrong colour.
Our world seems a little crazier, a little less stable, than it was yesterday or the day before.

And so the strange yet marvelous crew of characters from just beyond the veil of silvered glass and rabbit holes seem to have taken it upon themselves to call out to me have a stab at conjuring them anew. It was never originally my intention to create some illustrations for these rather over-illustrated books (Carroll's own original drawings having more magic in them than any that followed for me). The first few images formed themselves from other things, and the rest of Carroll's strange imaginings started calling out to be included as well. They seem, rather disturbingly, to have a life all of their own.
The pictures tell their own little stories, have their own meanings and tales to tell. What you see in them is as valid and as true as what I might see in them. At times you might see a representations of the loss of innocence, or a political observation about the manipulation of truth, then again you may discover a visual comment about the way our recollections of a story affect the way we see and interpret the characters and themes. Then again you might just find a character amusing or scary and leave it at that. I have tried where I can to show both the 'inside' and the 'outside' of the books, so you will find characters from the stories and also musings around the mundane personalities of the world of the author. Alice Liddell and the Reverend Dodson are as likely to make an appearance as Humpty Dumpty and the Queen Of Hearts. They all want to ask you to re-read the books and re-imagine them. To look deeper inside them, and at the reflections you find when you gaze at them in the looking glass world, and perhaps to imagine that they are somehow looking back...