The fairy tails of sammy sundae

This piece is a part of a series based of the original story of the little red riding hood by Perrault, He wrote it as a cautionary tale for adults, just like all the fairy tales that has now been adapted for children. In the original story the wolf had sex with the little red riding hood and it was implied that he raped her.

My version of the story is a sequel to that, shame grew in the belly of little red riding hood and Sammy Sundae was born. Sammy Sundae had a tail that reminded her mother of what had happened, she became increasingly paranoid and detest that part of Sammy so much that she abandoned her at her grandmother's place. Her grandmother treated her as a burden and as a sin staining her god-fearing house. Sammy got tired of arcane rules and ran away from home.

She no longer remains a victim who yearns to be save like her mother(like all the fairy tales), she decides to save herself and live on her own in the forest where good and evil intermingle. Sammy is also no longer ashamed of her tail, accepting herself entirely is essential to the story. She has a pair of scissors which she cuts the tails off of wolves and foxes, a symbol of what makes one sin, rehabilitating these once violent and evil wolves to morally righteous one. In a perfect fairy tale world that is, where right and wrong is black and white.

The symbols and metaphors in the story is very personal to me, as a female trying to break the stereotypes laid out by our culture of gender. I don't think I need to write a 10 page paper here go into the details but you get the idea. I have done a coloring book that narrates Sammy Sundae's story and I hope to make more coloring book collages to complete her world. I choose coloring books from the 40s-50s not only because I like the style of the era but it was also an era of strict misogynistic moral codes that set the stage for feminist movement in the 60's. I did not draw any of the black lines in my collages, strictly using found coloring books, rearranging them as I have rearrange the fairy tale to compose an image that is more fitting for our current society. It is important to me that the act of tearing up old coloring books, tearing up the images of stereotypical characters, is parallel to deconstructing history for a revisionist herstory.

The crayon scissors are also made for Sammy Sundae, and the room installation in previous posts.



Below are the collections of tails of Sammy Sundae. They are also numbered in a way that they all add up to 14, for example: 1616, 1+6+1+6=14. You can't see them in the pictures because they are paper cut out numbers painted with the same color of the background.