ONCE UPON A TIME...

  • Desirée Slabik
  • Eliska Sky
"There was a Queen of Hearts who had no idea about the true origin of the bright colours of the roses in her garden". For the second project, Spring Summer 2016, I imagined a scene from Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which three of the Queen of Hearts' 'playing card' servants are literally painting white roses red.

The project is about the creation of a constructed reality. Continuing, stating that "it is a white reality, like a blank white sheet of paper before everything starts, whether a written work or a painting; it all begins with the colour white". Therefore, this colour forms the backbone of the Spring-Summer project. I took the white shirt as a starting point, which also symbolises the painters from the story, elevating it into something new and fresh. Playing with the tailored elements of the shirt, I draped several white shirts at the same time, which allowed me to scale the proportions of the shirt. The oversized elements form a direct link to the storytelling of Alice in Wonderland, to the scenes in which she shrinks or grows, dependant on what she eats or drinks.