Inspired by Grimms' Fairy Tales
Shaun Tan
Allen & Unwin (2015)
ISBN 978 1 76011103 8
This
book contains handsome colour photographs of 75 sculptures by Shaun Tan. That
would be reason enough to enjoy it. Even
better, however, is that each sculpture illustrates a story from the folk tales
collected by the Brothers Grimm. Each colour plate is accompanied by the
appropriate brief extract from the
original tale (Jack Zipes’ translation). At the end of the book, there is a
brief summary of each of the 75 stories. This means that people who are not
familiar with the Grimm stories will find themselves intrigued and drawn to
seek them out.
These
are tiny sculptures – 6cm to 40cm – done in papier-mâché and clay. They may be
small but their impact is huge. As Philip Pullman points out in his Foreword, they
capture the “strangeness” of the fairy story world where animals talk and behave
like humans. There is a marvellous other-worldly feeling to each of the
sculptures. My favourite is the one used to illustrate Jack Zipes’ Introduction,
where two seated figures – obviously Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm – are hunched
over, writing furiously, to the dictation of a fox. The fox is a masterpiece of sculpted
simplicity, a sleek abstraction with sharp ears and broad tail. The sculpture is
as Shaun Tan notes, “only...a few red triangles.” Yet it is unmistakably a fox,
speaking confidently while the men listen intently.
The
pictures that follow are all different but they share the same intensity and
simplicity – a perfect match for the stories they illustrate.
Trevor
Agnew
(8 Jan 2017)
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