If I mention to someone - The Magic Porridge Pot, The Enormous Turnip, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Puss in Boots, Rumpelstiltskin, The Elves and the Shoemaker or Rapunzel, I am always greeted with the same response.... ‘Oh my God, I had forgotten those stories!’
Those Ladybird Well-Loved Tales; stories of grief, despair, poverty, hunger and loneliness, that surreptitiously consume our childhood and I believe remain with us, like a sharp fragment in our psyche, into adulthood. It is these images that form the basis of these works, juxtaposed with my continued examination of ‘This Is England.’
Writing of previous artworks, I have remarked that, ‘they identify with an anger at the loss of a ‘countries childhood.’ An idyllic, beautiful land found only in the Cinema; films that project an essence of what it is to be British. An indigenous spirit we want to believe in and hold true, but know deep down can’t ever really exist. They speak of a green land made only grey; the notion of ‘1984’ even more prevalent as we charge towards an uncertain future’
This statement is no less true now. I have looked through the artistic microscope and have taken a snapshot of ‘Our Britain’ in closer detail; specifically Stroud, where I am currently resident. These collages feature the old industrial warehouses and buildings that are themselves, quite beautiful.
What has emerged from the work is disturbing, haunting and provocative; in most, if not all, an item of red displays the warning sign, the omen of disaster. Snow White is dumped in her coffin in a tunnel. The parents of Red Riding Hood laugh as they decide whether or not to throw their child into the stream after she has been chatted up by the wolf. The Queen gives up her unwanted child in a dark alleyway. A young boy leads the blind man across the railway with a malevolent smirk on his face. From a distance the paedophile watches the young children walking home along by the canal.
These images are connotative and layer in suggestion and subversion. Littered around the factory sites are redundant aircraft ephemera, symbols and metaphors from the days when an island was at war, from the days of the ‘intangible cinema’, from the days of my lost England.
The poor carry home the enormous turnip for tea whilst the prince and princess stand outside their garage as jet aircraft from the new age scream overhead.
However, subversion breeds controversy. We witness a poster of Churchill; ‘Wanted For Treason’ hung around his neck. Churchill himself, emblematic of a Britain when Britain was great, now interrogated. These images question the bounds of the human spirit and extremism. Are we a country gone soft? Can the belief and love for ones country go too far and lead to a warped sense of reason?
The BNP is proof of that; the proud parents of Sleeping Beauty watch their daughter dance joyously along the river bank, having earned her BNP rosette. The huntsman who has lured Snow White to the factory to kill her wears the BNP slogan on his jacket. The troll protects his bridge which boasts 2 BNP warning triangles and the wicked queen marches through the streets of Stroud with a basket of BNP rosettes.
How sad it is that the swastika, a symbol of everything that Britain once stood against, is now the emblem of our own lack of vision.
Somewhere, at sometime, someone in an office looked at these Well-Loved Tales and redesigned them. They are no longer the images of fear and anguish; of a husband scaling a high wall to fetch green salad for his dying wife only to be confronted by an evil witch. They are no longer the image of a couple’s only child made from gingerbread.
Perhaps if we nurture the Young and the Innocent and breed promise, our once green land may, in time, be green again.
Mark S. Masters - April 2012