Across the globe, one discovers mermaid tales clinging like barnacles onto historic seaports, sharing themes of the cross-cultural outsider, human trafficking, economic injustice, environmental imbalance, and gender inequality.

FISHNETSTOCKINGS is inspired and informed by historical mermaid legends and their myriad literary variants. Both cautionary and emboldening, mermaid tales inhabit the blurred boundary between childhood longing and adulthood regret. In variants of the little mermaid tale, we find a story of the passage between worlds. Den Lille Havfrue, Hans Christian Andersen’s sacrificial rite-of-passage story sings out for alternative endings.

FISHNETSTOCKINGS also incorporates paper-cut collage images created by Alison Aune, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s improvised performance art of live scissor writing. Bifurcating imagery, like that made by folding and cutting, play a role in the aesthetics of the work.  H.C. Andersen’s paper-cuts anticipate the collage art of dada and surrealism… and some electronic literature experiments can trace their roots back to these techniques of assemblage.

H.C. Andersen Paper-Cut  (Wikimedia Commons )

August 2015 : Mixed-media artists Joellyn Rock and Alison Aune offer a hands-on visual art workshop on collage, paper-cutting, silhouettes and digital compositing. Hosted at Lydgalleriet in Bergen, the playful workshop generated mixed-media collages, paper cuts, silhouettes, and discussion of digital compositing for video projection using a mix of low-tech and high-tech tools.

Digital Workshop  Tuesday, August 4  2015 • 14:00 – 16:30

at Lydgalleriet     Østre Skostredet 3     5017 Bergen  Norway