Key in hand, Alice pulls again the curtain to seek out the tiny, doll-sized door that may lead her to Wonderland. John Tenniel’s unique illustration is an image of revelation, a second of magic, because the little lady’s curiosity grows in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, initially revealed in 1865. It was Tenniel who first visualized the heroine in her well-known puff-sleeved pinafore costume and pumps.
Since then, artists have responded to the writer’s puzzling imagery with even higher freedom, unbound by the format of a ebook. Alice, together with an entire forged of curious characters, has been transported to full-color work, public realm sculptures and playful collages. However why has this story held such enduring attraction, and what meanings can we discover in its unusual symbolism?
From the Nineteen Thirties, Carroll’s illogical fantasyland immediately impressed the Surrealists, with Eileen Agar writing in admiration that the writer was a “mysterious grasp of time and creativeness.” Salvador Dalí painted Alice as a girlish muse, skipping innocently via the nonsense world and journeying into realms of the unconscious in his illustrations for a particular version of the ebook.
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In the meantime, René Magritte was extra deeply influenced by the story’s absurd panorama for his canvas Alice in Wonderland, 1946. Difficult the boundaries between goals and actuality, he invitations viewers right into a hazy-colored, anthropomorphic woodland, the place surreality sprouts from timber and floating pears, each of which have faces.
By the Fifties, Alice had entered our collective consciousness, making appearances within the Pop Artwork of Peter Blake and Sigmar Polke. It was additionally throughout this era that Mary Blair labored on the idea artwork for Walt Disney’s animated movie of 1951. Towards a kaleidoscopic background of heightened colour contrasts, Alice emerged earlier than household audiences in her iconic blue costume.
This outfit has been a place to begin for a number of artists, together with painter Roxana Halls. Closely influenced by cinema, she enacts scenes with fashions, props, wigs and costumes inside her studio. Wearing full Disney garb, an impertinent-looking heroine climbs via The ALICE Staircase, 2013. Comprising eight interlinking canvases, two tales are advised in reverse instructions—Alice in Wonderland as you stroll down and Via the Trying Glass as you stroll up, the culminating passages of every story assembly on the centre.
Amongst this intentionally topsy-turvy narrative, Alice finds herself framed by an intriguing passageway of symbolic, pastel-colored doorways in The Pool of Tears, 2013. Because the artist tells Observer: “Alice is wise and she or he is boundlessly curious, she prises open each door which could not want to allow her and ventures into territories which might moderately not admit her.”
Alice belongs to a wider forged of wayward ladies who’re discovered laughing and consuming their manner via Halls’ theatrical work. Right here, the little lady has consumed the magical potion and cake, seen within the image, identical to their size-shifting penalties. “As would any true adventurer, when offered with a cake which says Eat Me and a bottle which says Drink Me, she is much too wilfully inquisitive to not style them,” says Halls.
All through the staircase, she presents the heroine in intentionally subversive phrases: “Alice is commonly inappropriate and resistant to self-censure: having no worry of authority, she as a substitute asks each query which happens to her no matter propriety, ceaselessly scorning the preposterous solutions she receives in return.”
In distinction, Marzena Ablewska-Lech exhibits the character in additional reflective moments, though once more sporting a Disney-inspired outfit in Gown No 1, 2024. As Alice holds up her full skirt, mild catches the shimmering blue material, from which she appears to hunt solutions. Its folds meander just like the strains of a map—one which Alice will want as she strikes between childhood and maturity.
This artist has drawn on psychoanalytic readings that stress that the story is rooted in truths about rising up. Scholar Jack Zipes has written, “Fairy tales for the reason that starting of recorded time, and maybe earlier, have been a way to beat the terrors of mankind via metaphor,” and Carroll’s visions of Alice rising and shrinking whereas happening a journey have been interpreted as a coming-of-age narrative by ladies artists particularly.
“In Alice, there’s a lovely sense of teenage oddity when her physique begins quickly remodeling,” Ablewska-Lech tells Observer. “I used to be fascinated with rising up in a physique which serves you durations, pimples, too lengthy limbs and rising breasts.” By specializing in costumes, she interrogates “the connection women and girls have with their our bodies,” together with her personal. Experiencing perimenopause signs whereas portray this image, the artist felt that she was “residing in a wierd, utterly not fitted costume.”
This theme continues in Gabby Roberts-Dalton’s portray Queen of Hearts, 2018-19, for which she has taken as her muse the story’s antagonist. In fairy tales, older ladies are sometimes pictured as harmful witches and evil hags, however Roberts-Dalton complicates the imagery of depraved feminine characters, inviting new methods of wanting on the raging Queen of Hearts in her depiction.
Staring warily on the viewer, this sympathetic determine seems much less tyrannical than susceptible, bandaged in strips of white fabric, whereas pink hearts seem on a line of sanitary towels stacked on the wall behind her. This can be a self-portrait of kinds. “The Queen of Hearts is a mad character, and the menopause has induced emotions of mind fog and insanity in me,” the artist tells Observer. “However she’s additionally an elder lady of power. I take advantage of pink hearts to symbolize time passing, the month-to-month cycle and menstruation changing into a trophy of a feminine’s life.”
Whereas her character has been sure, like a wound, the ends of the fabric remodel into wings that symbolize what the artist refers to as “the releasing change that comes with age.” By subverting photographs of Carroll’s unstable ruler, Roberts-Dalton manifests her private experiences and explores the broader theme of ladies ageing.
Ladies’s lives are additionally a major topic for Kiki Smith, who merges archetypical characters from fantasy and fairy tales in a multimedia apply that features big public sculptures reminiscent of Seer (Alice II), 2005. Painted pure white, the little lady of huge, surreal scale evokes Tenniel’s illustrations and the unique story through which she retains altering dimension.
Kneeling within the earth, delicate arms stretching downwards, Alice seems deeply related to nature, virtually as if she’s been reborn from it. Given her contemplative pose, the character embodies a non secular, otherworldly high quality. Showing as a visionary seer, her outward stillness contrasts with the sense of interiority and energetic thoughts: as she gazes into the space, what has she seen?
Yayoi Kusama, too, takes viewers inside Alice’s thoughts along with her set of fascinating illustrations from 2012, through which Wonderland is roofed along with her attribute polka dots and psychedelic colours. Since childhood, the Japanese artist has seen the world in a surreal, hallucinogenic manner, thus turning to Carroll’s universe as an area for self-expression and a metaphor for psychological sickness. Figuring out with the heroine, she’s mentioned, “I, Kusama, am the fashionable Alice in Wonderland.”
Altered by artists via the ages, the ebook’s numerous illustrations have turn out to be the bodily materials that Corwin Levi assimilates into his intricate, vintage-quality collages. For Ears, Whiskers, and Watches, 2025, he collected and collaged collectively greater than fifty Golden Age White Rabbit illustrations; every repeated character, dressed barely in another way, runs ahead in a clock-shaped, round composition.
By remixing depictions from cultures all over the world, Levi’s superbly layered collage proves how fairy tales are concurrently timeless and evolve via every retelling, with limitless potentialities. Crafting an beautiful visible compendium, the artist has usual what he refers to as “a loop exploring ideas of time, journey and vacation spot.”
It’s the vacation spot of Wonderland, an infinite playground, which continues to draw artists. “It’s a spot for us to go to, linger, and draw inspiration from—it’s a visceral house exploring the sides of human risk and creativeness,” Levi tells Observer. “Anybody can, if they permit themselves, journey to realms that embody Wonderland, to wander about—and, if the travellers are beneficiant, to return again and translate their experiences for the remainder of us.”
As we enter an age of generative A.I., algorithms and data-led selections, human creativeness and creativity should be prioritized, as it’s in Wonderland. With no mounted that means, Carroll’s dream narrative continues to provide artists house and liberty to attract on its surreal symbolism, coming-of-age narratives, puns and puzzles to make their very own sense, or nonsense, from a narrative which is about tales. So long as there are artists, Alice will preserve wandering via Wonderland.
