The changing face of female characters in fairy tales 🧚👸🐉

Artist and photographer Lorena Carrington has read to her two daughters since they were babies. As they grew older, Lorena got increasingly frustrated with the typical fairy tales and movies on offer.

Recovering stories of courageous girls was a central theme of Lorena’s exhibition at Bendigo Library in 2014, Brave Girls of Fairy Tales.

"I went looking for stronger stories to give my daughters the inspiration to go on their own adventures," she says. The old Russian tale of Vasalisa the Brave and Baba Yaga ticks all the boxes, and Lorena centres her exhibition around it.

"I chose the story of Vasalisa, in part, just because it’s a great story. It’s got adventure, it’s got excitement, it’s got death."

She laughs, "It’s even got flaming skulls!"

Each artwork offers a way into the story, and reflects how a story can be interpreted in different ways.

The slides and photographs are the result of Lorena transforming forty individual macro photographs. Toadstools, sticks, leaves and pinecones are just some of the things she shot in her Castlemaine backyard, local streets, Kalimna Forest and a nearby pine forest.

Lorena then montaged these photos into silhouettes for the glass slides, and made a composite photo that sits alongside the story excerpt in a beautiful red velvet book. The photographs in the slideshow above are from Lorena’s exhibition, and are also examples of her general artwork around fairytales.

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