Anna McNay has written a review of Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter for Studio International. Her review highlights some of the links between Carter’s literary works and the artworks on display at the exhibition, held at the RWA in Bristol. She notes, for example, the paintings on display that are featured in Carter’s documentary The Holy Family Album (1991), such as William Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death (1870-73), Arnulf Rainer’s Wine Crucifix (1957-78) and Stanley Spencer’s Marriage at Cana, Bride and Bridegroom (1953). McNay also spots resonances between, for example, Wendy Elia’s “pre-op transsexual” Maxime (2010) and Carter’s 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve, which features a young man, Evelyn, who is forcibly turned into a woman to become the titular New Eve.
McNay also discusses a number of artworks that draw on the tradition of the fairy or folk tale, which Carter herself worked with in her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) as well as anthologised in the two Virago Books of Fairy Tales. As she notes of Ana Maria Pacheco’s series of 10 drypoints, The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen (2014), they are, like Carter’s stories, “imbued with a rich sense of terror, a mixture of thrill and fear, often engendering a ‘shudder of delight'”.
To read McNay’s full review, head over to Studio International by clicking here.
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Angela Carter Online 