Making the Unbelievable, Believable

This is an excerpt of an article and discussion I wrote and organised for The Royal College of Art.

The full article can be seen here: http://www.communications-rca.com/curated_conversations/index.html

I was also asked to write an article for Varoom magazine about the event:  http://www.varoom-mag.com/backissues/varoom07.html

Making the Unbelievable, Believable:

Magical & Fictional Worlds in Visual Art

Discussion convened by Hayley Potter and Marcela Alejandra,
with guest speakers Michael Foreman, Marina Warner, Ben Norland
and staff and students in Communication Art & Design at the RCA.

Hayley Potter: When we talk about believable fictional worlds in art, we are talking about creating magical visual environments that are believable and real in their own right. These may be the kind of worlds you read about in a book or encounter as a sequence of pictures, but these worlds have the power to carry your imagination beyond the limit of text. It seems to be impossible to escape the importance of magical and fictional worlds in today’s society; is this because the need to escape has become so essential? 

Marcela Alejandra: As visual communicators, creating a strong personal and fictional world is important to us. Here at the RCA we are encouraged to develop a personal way of making images. We want to discuss how that feeds into commercial work in a wider context.

Michael, what do you consider to be a believable fictional world?

Michael Foreman: Well, I suppose in my work I have been trying to set the surprising in the real world. Traditional stories, fairy tales
and so forth – I’ve set them in a landscape that is appropriate to the text, but also in a landscape of which I have first hand knowledge –
a landscape that I’ve drawn and travelled through. So, I’m not trying to create a believable fictional world as such because I always work with a real location. The main character that drives my stories is the actual place rather than a person or creature. I will set a story in a particular environment so that the characters can come alive.

Marina Warner: Ruskin, the painter, has a very famous passage where he is discussing a griffin, a creature that as far as we know does not exist… they may yet be discovered, but they remain unbelievable at the moment. Ruskin has this illustration which he says is a picture of a true griffin and next to it, another picture of a false griffin. Side-by-side, he then tries to resolve what a true griffin is and maintains that it must come from the imagination. The false griffin is made up of parts. Someone has taken the claws of a dragon, the talons of an eagle, the beak of a hawk, etc. and has put them all together. Ruskin says that as this has not turned molten in the imagination, it is not a true griffin. But if you show students these two pictures, it is very difficult to spot the right one. It isn’t obvious which griffin is true or false. I think that this idea applies to the landscape of the imagination, not just to the landscape of reality. Imaginary worlds need to be embodied to have real features. The imaginary body has to be a working body.

In the Victoria & Albert Museum there is a medieval sculpture of an angel, and the tunic dress has slits embroidered around the edges where the wings come out.  Now that is a true angel. It’s like when snow is painted, it has to embody real snow to be believable.