The National Trust’s Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock is to present an exhibition by American artist Maggie Taylor featuring images she has created for a new edition of the classic Lewis Carroll story 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland'.
Maggie Taylor has been working for the past three years on a series of original images to accompany the original Lewis Carroll text. The new version of 'Alice' is to be published by Modernbook of Palo Alto, California, this summer.
The exhibition, 'Maggie Taylor’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', features a selection of prints from the 45 images. Taylor scans original 19th-century photographs, line drawings and illustrations from books, then combines them with her own landscape photographs to create surreal images. They are then layered on top of one another using Adobe Photoshop, sometimes with as many as 60 layers to create a unique type of digital image which erases the boundary between photography and illustration.
© Maggie Taylor
Maggie Taylor was born in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from Yale University with a BA in philosophy before studying for an MFA in photography from the University of Florida. For approximately 10 years she worked with a camera and film creating still-life images in her studio and garden. In 1996 she began working digitally, using a scanner in place of a camera.
'The images use digital technology to combine 19th-century photographs of people with contemporary scans of objects and background images' she says. 'I am particularly interested in daguerreotypes of people from the Victorian era - each of my Alices is a different Victorian girl.'
Roger Watson, curator of the museum, observed:
'Maggie’s Alice images build bridges between the past and the present and between fact and fantasy. They leap over the 20th century, uniting Carroll’s 19th century fantasy with 21st century technology. These images offer the visual truth of photography while creating scenes that could never occur in real life - much as Carroll combined the travels of Alice, a real girl, with the nonsensical world of Wonderland.'
© Maggie Taylor
Although Carroll is best known for his Alice stories, he was also a highly respected amateur photographer whose images were some of the most original of the 19th century. His photographs, including images of Alice Liddell, after whom Alice was named, are today highly prized by museums and art collectors.
The Fox Talbot Museum is dedicated to the inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot who lived at Lacock Abbey from 1827 to 1877.
'Maggie Taylor’s Alice in Wonderland' is at Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock in Wiltshire, from Saturday 5 July to Sunday 14 December.
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