Artist Kandis Williams on Fairy Tales

A Black woman describes being seen through exaggerated, fairy-tale-like associations tied to colonial projects and mass media. In Asia, strangers compare her to Beyoncé and Mother Nature, and she feels those images arrive before her lived body. Work travel between Shanghai and London intensifies Blackness into a range from fetishism and adoration to structural exclusion. She compares the experience to being made small like a bug and then made huge like a giant. She is writing a fairy tale for a solo show, using personal experiences to generate surreal fictions. She says new stories are needed to transform, wake after long sleeps, and enable weird encounters with witches and warlocks who shackle or chain people, offering new quests and elixirs rather than familiar heroes.

"Being a Black woman is strange because I'm carrying these almost fairy-tale-like exaggerations in my own body. When I went to Asia recently, someone said, 'You look like Beyoncé.' Another person told me that I look like Mother Nature. I can trace that trail of images and associations back to colonial projects and mass media, but I live in a body where I know those images come before me. It's almost like this enchanted forest - you might get lost in that ugliness or get taken to a strange, golden realm when you're mistaken for this kind of mystical being."

"Travelling between Shanghai and London for work has really stretched the experience of Blackness from fetishism and adoration to super-intense structural exclusion. It's like being rendered as small as a bug and then as big as a giant. I'm writing a fairy tale right now for a solo show, so I guess that process has been about tapping into those very personal experiences for the surrealisms and fictions they hold already."

"I realised that we don't need to reframe existing fairy tales - we just need new stories that provide a practice for transforming, for waking after long sleeps and for weird encounters with witches and warlocks who shackle or chain us. We have to go in search of new quests, figure out new elixirs. I think that is going to be the kind of exaggeration that gets some people through this political and cultural moment. It's not going to be Captain America or Prince Charming, right?"

"Stories are fundamental to the practice of the artist Kandis Williams. Not just the telling of stories, but their construction, their dissemination and their power to shape how we collectively understand feelings such as harm, guilt, shame, fear and justice. "There's a need for fiction and fairy tales to keep grounding us and teaching us how to be human to each other," she says."

Read at AnOther