Fairy Tales of the Anthropocene: Drawing Stories for a New Age of Forest Fairy Tale

Abstract

What would a contemporary fairy tale set in the forest look like? In European folktales, the forest serves as a setting for morality lessons, social commentary, magical encounters with animals, and often violent or unsettling outcomes. Today, in the context of the Anthropocene, the current geologic age in which humans have impacted the planet beyond repair, forests are contested sites where human activity encroaches on animal habitats and threatens fragile ecosystems. The resulting interactions between people, animals, and trees at the forest edge form the subject matter for my series of ink drawings and oil paintings. Using a gaggle of girls as my flawed protagonists, the series interweaves my own autobiography with forest myths, news stories, social media posts of recent events in U.S. National Parks, and accounts of human-caused extinctions. What began as a single drawing depicting the killing of the last Great Auk—a penguin-like bird from the North Atlantic that went extinct in the mid-19th century—expanded into a complex narrative evoking the blindness and folly of human misdeeds against the natural world.