The Enchanted Woods
The Enchanted Woods is a 3-walled immersive video installation animating an imaginary forest landscape. The open narrative follows a single day loop of different characters wandering in the woods. Using photo-collage, animation and costumed characters filmed on green-screen composited together, the work speaks a hybrid language that is more painterly and performative than cinematic. A lumberjack cuts trees, witches appear at night conjuring spells in the mist, insects crawl up mossy logs as ferns unfurl as the wild man of the woods watches from his tree. It is a surreal mix of memory, myth and mystery. I want the viewers’ eyes to be diverted in all directions. In the spirit of the Dada and Surrealist art movement, my work is influenced by a culture of collage, and follows panoramic traditions of the 19th century.
The Enchanted Woods is part of a larger series of work Video Terrariums, which is a collection of panoramic video landscapes using multiple screens and integrating various animation/compositing techniques to reference scenic dioramas as one might find in a natural history museum illustrating a variety of habitats.
THE ENCHANTED WOODS STORY
Once upon a time there was a majestic forest populated with unknown flowers, moving ferns, silky mushrooms, and pineapples hanging from the oak. Once upon a time there was a kingdom without masters or gods where multiple creatures live in proximity and act in parallel. A place made of layers from far away origins. This elsewhere and its creatures come from ancestral tales and legends reminding us of the existence of deformed beings gifted with supernatural powers, from fairy tales for kids, literary references for adults, myths from the amazon, Shakespearean theatre, personal memories, dreams.
The precision of knotted trunks, the elevated boles on which the light plays shades, the greenness of leaves, ferns or moss, the whiteness of mushrooms or the ochre of some of their caps draw a typical forest and it is in fact the childhood of Allison Moore, superb and deep. Everything revolves around the royal tree, home of the Wildman, refuge for lost children and place of buried treasure. The status of the immense tree whose trunk of enormous dimensions receives like the thick branches of a candelabra the nuances of light; this marked location overbids the passage from reality to a marvellous elsewhere. Unexpected flowers bloom in an unnatural pace and the general disproportions of the floral elements contribute to the invention of the place.
The project adopts the title Enchanted Woods, a name given to a series of three adventures written by Enid Blyton in which some kids access worlds through a ladder at the summit of a magical tree. The composition of the woods anchors its world in the large tree ruling in its center.
Fantastic tales set up the disturbing oddness by bursting the irrational in the real.