Artist shows sinister side of fairy tales

Voodoo dolls and fairy tales come to life in Sharon Singer's world. The Dunedin artist will unleash a Pandora's box of her brooding, enigmatic works in an exhibition this weekend.

 

• Slideshow: A look at pieces from Singer's exhibition

Hunger, Dreams and Speech Between a Bruise and a Blush is Singer's first exhibition in Dunedin.

‘‘They're beguiling. Like candy, they lure you in, but you're not sure if they're good for you,'' she says of the work, smiling.

The former Norsewear Art Awards winner and James Wallace Art Awards finalist came to Dunedin in 2005 to complete a master of fine arts degree at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art, and the exhibition is the culmination of her master's work.

‘‘I've just been head down, working since I arrived in Dunedin. This is my first exhibition for several years and it's the first time these works have had an outing,'' she says.

The exhibition includes paintings and soft sculpture, influenced by her fascination with classic European fairy tales.

‘‘I've always loved fairy tales; ever since I was a young girl. The thing about fairy tales is that everyone has their own memories and perceptions of them. They have the ability to simultaneously beguile, enchant and provoke,'' she says.

‘‘I'm fascinated by the tension that exists between fairy tales and utopian ideals, too. There's a lot of imagery in fairy tales, because within them there are these paradigms.

"Fairy tales are incredibly violent. You have kids getting lost and abandoned and eaten by monsters and all sorts of things.''

A component of the exhibition is a menagerie of soft sculptures created from abandoned dolls, which are also recurring motifs in her paintings.

‘‘I source all my dolls from op shops. I find these discarded dolls and take them home and paint them and alter them and they become my still-life subjects,'' she says.

‘‘Dolls speak about children. These ones have been discarded and I'm resurrecting them. They're tactile and they suggest play, but there's also something sinister about them . . . something not quite right. I like the juxtaposition of those qualities. It suggests all sorts of crazy narratives and I think that's something that reverberates through a lot of my work,'' Singer says.

‘‘It's nice to challenge those Disney perceptions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the like. You've got to mix things up sometimes. When I'm painting, an image will float into my head, but it will quickly evolve once it's there. It takes on a life of its own.''

The broken dolls are also a metaphor for the black and the unspeakable.

‘‘New Zealand's got the third-worst statistics for child abuse in the developed world. That's just incredible and this work enters into a discourse about that,'' she says.

‘‘What really made the link for me was seeing all these news headlines about kids getting shaken and disciplined to death. We too-readily accept things. But, if you can imagine something, you can make it happen. And, if you're going to make something up, why not make good choices?''

Singer finds burlesque in the everyday. One of her works, Yo bitch, what big eyes you have, was inspired by a group of children in hoodies waiting at a Dunedin bus stop.

Her dark take on the Little Red Riding Hood fable, Little Dread Riding Hood, has just been used by Routledge Press on the cover of Fairy tales and the art of subversion by Jack Zipes.

Singer was born in Essex, England, and emigrated to New Zealand with her family when she was 10.

She has two teenage children. Their father was tragically killed a decade ago.

‘‘Their father was killed in Hawkes Bay. He was killed 10 years ago by a group of kids not much older than my kids are now. The perpetrators were convicted of manslaughter,'' she says.

‘‘They were kids from families with gang affiliations. Violence is like that. It's a cycle that perpetuates itself and the impact is much bigger than families and societies; it's global. It's not just happening in New Zealand,'' she says.

‘‘It was a very, very traumatic time, but it also gave my art a lot of power. Art should talk about something other than itself. It's good to context it to something bigger.

‘‘I'd always had an interest in painting, but I was working for Social Welfare and about to hit my 30s and one day I thought ‘something's missing'. So, that was it. I tossed in my job and applied to do an art diploma at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Hawkes Bay.

‘‘But, after doing that for a while, I decided I was missing the point and that art had some bigger thing happening. So, I decided to do art therapy. It's like psychotherapy, but using the modality of drama, music and painting. That's the play dough you use.''

‘‘I got a lot out of it and brought some of that stuff to my master's [degree]. But, everything shifts, doesn't it? There's something wrong if you don't shift about, and fairy tales are all about transformation. You have to have some belief that people can change. Like those kids [who killed her partner]. Change is the only constant, I think. The joy of art is it keeps on revealing new things. Good art does that just like good music does.''

Hunger, Dreams and Speech Between a Bruise and a Blush opens at Salisbury House Gallery tomorrow and runs till Wednesday, March 26.

The gallery is open from 11am till 5pm on Friday, 11am till 4pm on Saturday, and Sunday by appointment.