THE STORYTELLER, THE LISTENER, AND OUR STORY
Paper and Light Installation
2021
Exhibitions:
2022 - Lucca Paper Biennale, Italy
2022 - Museum Rijswijk, The Netherlands
2022 - VCRB Gallery, Belgium
Awards/Publications:
2021- Artsthread Global Design Graduate Show - Public Vote winner in FineArt/Photography/Craft
2021 - Dutch Designers Yearbook
2021 - Metropolitian M - Eindexamens van graduating students
2021 - Metropolitian M - Eindexamens van graduating students
Layla May Arthur found her inspiration for this work in the stories her parents told her as a child growing up on the island of Jersey. Her parents travelled frequently before she was born and as she grew up, shared with her stories from faraway lands. Arthur spent her childhood fantasising about the lives and lands in these stories and imagining from her parent’s words exactly what they looked like. She would frequently act out the stories in childhood games, where they would become entirely new narratives as she dreamed about the possibilities these stories could hold.
Arthur has made an installation of meticulously hand cut paperwork, which is theatrically illuminated to create an otherworldly environment. As a viewer, you step into the shadows of the work to find yourself absorbed with the intricate imagery and slight movements of the shadows as they play over your skin. You temporarily feel as if you are in a dream like place, where the stories around you breath and you become immersed in the narratives dialogue.
With her work, Arthur encourages the viewer to use their own associations and interpretations of her imagery to dream about where the narrative has come from and where is it going. It is not about a precise genesis of a storyline but how we work with possibility within narratives. These are the fragments of narratives which Arthur remembers imagining in her childhood; as they were, but also reconstructed by her imagination.
She invites you to step into her world of stories to think back on the stories you already know and to dream your own new narratives.
The installation presents stories as possibilities, where the viewer uses their own assumptions to guess at which stories are shown and then to dream about where the narrative is going. The stories have no titles, no beginning and no end; leaving them open for the imagination to create entirely new narratives of possibility.
