Sometime back in the spring, my image generating experiments led me to pull together a fun little series of Alice in Wonderland inspired fauxtographs. At the time, I intended they be just that, some fun visuals I could share on IG and the blog. While I was never that into the Dineyfied version of Alice, and came to the Lewis Carrol original as an adult, not a child, I was fascinated by the actual Alice Liddel and the world that Carrol created for her. I did a deeper dive a couple years back for a lesson I was writing and made notes for a project that took quite a while to happen and kept getting shoved aside for more pressing things.
This April, as NAPOWRIMO dawned, I decided to finally take my notes and scribbles and see if I could shake out some Alice pieces to go with the images for a zine. At first it was harder, then it was easier, and while I did not devote the entire month to writing them (another series took my attention the latter half of the month) but I wound up with 15 or so pieces I was happy with and have spent the past couple months tweaking them and working on a version for this latest zine.
It was serendipitous that we were planning on seeing another Alice adaptation on stage at the end of July, so I held off on the final design to see if that inspired me further, and it no doubt did. In that case, Alice is a teen caught in the middle of war who sees Carrol's strange world as a refuge from adulthood and reality. My version moves back and forth and back again from child to adult Alice echoing themes that are true to the original and superimposing other themes like body image and domesticity on top of them, with a slightly more macabre take on magical world.
While this was intended to be the July zine, I've been a little tardy since I was slammed with freelance stuff and then out of town for a couple days over J's birthday festivities, which means we get not one, but two zines this month (watch later this month for BROKEN PLACES before we move into full-on spooky for fall.)
You can real my little Alice project , SPILL, here...
