Let's just start at the beginning shall we...

I've wanted to share more about the thought process and stories behind my creations for so long but wasn’t sure how best to do it. One thing I love about creating artwork is how it makes others feel, and how everyone always has a different and very personal interpretation of what they see within it. I put off wanting to share my personal interpretation as I didn’t want to spoil the way others saw my work, and influence how they may relate to it. However, I feel that the hidden messages within my creations just adds more to their character, it makes them even more charming. I hope they also help us create conversations about tricky thoughts and feelings in a comfortable uplifting way. So here we are, grab yourself a cuppa and (hopefully) enjoy the Ill-Fitting Thoughts Blog…

So for the first post I thought I’d talk about where Ill-Fitting Fables started and make some sense of the thought process behind the creations of these inanimate object hybrid animals.

Long story short, I have always adored animals, so it is no mystery to why throughout my creative practice through school and Art School that animals became my main muse. I began to research more into animal symbolism and found comfort in understanding how animals are used in traditional and contemporary storytelling. I began to understand why I used animals in my own storytelling, as I seemed to find it easier to express personal feelings using animal forms as appose to human, it feels less intrusive and confronting. I felt that it opened up a further perspective, allowing individuals to see more of what they wanted to see, and interpret it in a less restrictive frame.

I found myself featuring stags in my artwork a lot, and capturing my spirit within them. There is a beautiful Aesop Fable about a Stag and his Reflection, which I have put at the end of this blog. The fable is about how ‘We often make much of the ornamental and despise the useful’ . I felt that this was how I was treating many different aspects of my life, including my mental health. I started to refer to my stag like self looking at its reflection in the lake, when reflecting on my own emotions. When I felt stressed and overwhelmed I would say I am carrying a lot on my antlers. I would imagine myself as a stag stuck in a game of buckaroo, with all my heavy thoughts and feelings hanging on my antlers like an inconvenient coat rack.

Visualizing my overwhelming emotions this way helped me understand them more and make them easier to talk about. It took the seriousness out of explaining true emotions and made them feel more normal and manageable. We feel endless amounts of emotions, and each emotion is so incredibly complex, that sometimes there is just no easy way to put into words how you are actually feeling. As crazy as it sounds to say "I feel like a Stag Coat Rack" it just seems to make sense for me, and makes the whole feeling of being overwhelmed a less negative and scary thing to admit. As these feelings should be expressed and shared more as they are completely normal and needed for us to actually function through life.

So that's where Ill-Fitting Fables started, like the traditional Fables where animal characters are used to teach us moral lessons, I use my creations to tell stories of thoughts and feelings we experience which aren't so easy to express and understand. Using inanimate objects combined with animals doesn't quiet fit in the usual ideas of Fables story telling, but they just feel right at the same time, much like our feelings.

The Stag and His Reflection

An Aesop Fable

 A Stag, drinking from a crystal spring, saw himself mirrored in the clear water. He greatly admired the graceful arch of his antlers, but he was very much ashamed of his spindling legs.

"How can it be," he sighed, "that I should be cursed with such legs when I have so magnificent a crown."

At that moment he scented a panther and in an instant was bounding away through the forest. But as he ran his wide-spreading antlers caught in the branches of the trees, and soon the Panther overtook him. Then the Stag perceived that the legs of which he was so ashamed would have saved him had it not been for the useless ornaments on his head.