The Fairy Tales Project (2020) is a series I started during the Covid 19 pandemics. I delved into my childhood, trying to salvage emotional fragments of personal memories, shapes, feelings. Uncertain, incomplete, sometimes painful, because not all fairy tales sport happy endings and not everything we remember happened.
The Childhood of the Elephant Matriarch is a work about pain and childhood. It all started with a story about a baby elephant, lost in the jungle, away from his parents, frantically trying to find them. They never did, that`s how the poem ended, with the baby elephant learning to live and survive on his own. I don`t remember the author, just that every time my mother read it to me I started crying. So, I tried to complete their story just like I remeber it now, fragmented, uncertain and full of pain. Not all fairy tales enjoy a happy ending.
The Childhood of the Elephant Matriarch
(50x70cm, acrylics, ink on paper, 2020)
Artist: Roxana Donaldson
The work has been used as an artistic intervention in Arta Magazine, the dossier dedicated to 2022 Venice Bienale, to represent an Romanian take on Leonora Carrington`s Milk of Dreams.
We live in a world were the human gaze gives meaning to everything, but this meaning is a human meaning, not a universal one. Alternative truths also encompass the truth of the fish and, ultimately, the truth of the ladder, if ladders had eyes and would question or label around.
If ladders had eyes they would probably look at the universe and ask about its meaning. Fish do have eyes and look around, but how would they relate to, let’s say, a ladder? Most probably, the fish would see the ladder but fail in finding its meaning just like the ladder cannot understand the fish. I ask you to join them not as a gaze regulator but as an equal companion, a fellow person of the world we all live in.
Ladder Watching a Fish
(50x70cm, acrylics&ink on paper, 2020)
Artist: Roxana Donaldson
It all started with an obssessive thought about Magritte`s famous art work - ceci nest pas une pipe. It is, to me, a statetment about how our mind is tricked and also tricks us into equating representation with reality. Just like we sometimes equal emotions and thought with reality. Why not apply this to feelings and memories? Is our mind a jar of recollections? Is it a circus of fragmented partial truths, is it, maybe, a made up truth about our individuality? Do we own our self? Is there such a thing? Just like candies in a jar we project and collect in our mind thoughts, memories of our experiences, smells, feelings. And we swear it feels real. But how much truth is there, and how much delusion?
This Is Not a Jar
(50x65cm, acrylics, ink on paper, 2020)
Artist: Roxana Donaldson
roxanadonaldson.ro 