Abigail Drapkin

Fairytailes of the Anthropocene, 2017 - 2019

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I grew up exploring the forests of Midcoast Maine, but for the past ten years I have lived in cities — Boston, Paris, San Francisco, and Seattle. My change of scenery every few years drove me to investigate the stories behind a landscape that are passed down through folklore, influenced by current events, and infused into popular culture.

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My body of work, Fairytales of the Anthropocene, uses sequential imagery in the form of ink transfer drawings and oil paintings to investigate the complex narratives humans tell about the forest and their role within it. The forest has been used throughout history as a setting for morality lessons, magical and frightening encounters with animals, and often unsettling outcomes. Tapping the childhood imagination — where fiction filters true events — I address the question of what a contemporary fairy tale set in an ancient forest would look like.

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In the context of the Anthropocene, our current geological era where humans have impacted the planet beyond repair, diminishing forest habitats symbolize the endangered biodiversity that rely on them. To tell this story, my series uses a gaggle of girls as its flawed protagonists. The drawings are as constructed and collaged as the story itself, which interweaves references to European folktales, paintings by Bruegel and Goya, the account of the Last Great Auk, and social media posts of the recent destruction within US National Parks. The subsequent events tread the ambiguous line between play and violence, evoking the blindness and folly of human misdeeds against the natural world.

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See Fairytales of the Anthropocene prints here.