Zellandine, 2015

Zellandine is a group of five works made for a solo exhibition at Devonport Live, Plymouth. Its source is the story of Zellandine and Troylus in Perceforest, an anonymous French prose romance of the fourteenth century and one of the earliest known versions of the tale later retold by Basile, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm as Sleeping Beauty.

In Perceforest, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep when a splinter of flax pierces her finger. Troylus, carried to her tower by Zephyr, does not wake her with a kiss. He assaults her as she sleeps, and it is the child born nine months later who draws the splinter from her finger and breaks the spell.

Douglas sets the sanitised fairy tale against this older and darker source. Plaster cloth recalls the white curtains of Zellandine's bed and the wings of Zephyr, while electrical cable, copper pipe and Bakelite junction boxes, finished in domestic gloss paint, draw the myth into the fabric of the home. Rose and hawthorn thorns recur throughout and gather in spindle: a barbed copper coil around a single red glass orb, the drop of blood from Zellandine's finger.

“Our modern fairy-tales are very sanitised, we forget that they have older, darker roots in our folklore and mythology.”

Iain Douglas