WENDY NELSON
SCULPTOR

OLD DAY / NEW DAY STORY BOX

Portable 3 : Old Night New Day Story Box

Found box, old carving knife, escutcheon. chicken bones, dolls hair etc; wood; fabric and kapok; papier mache

 

Looking up martyred female saints for Doll Triptych, I was struck with how like fairy stories the accounts of their lives often are. Besides mandatory virginity and the extreme goodness of a fairy story princess, they were invariably beautiful and 'high born' which did not prevent them from being betrayed by pagan fathers wishing to marry them off to men they could never love and so on. (St Barbara was locked up in a tower just like Rapunzel). 

 

All this came together in Old Night/New Day Story Box after I had been intrigued by the little portable altars stuffed full of tiny parcels of saints' relics at the British Museum Treasures of Heaven show. I've replaced the relics with bits of old stories, and just as those tiny parcels might or might not be the real thing, the falling apple in Old Night/New Day might be Eve's, or might be Snow Whites's. There might be a crown of thorns above it or it might be the thicket surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle. You decide.