I love to create! Every time the muses manage to reach us, in these busy days when we don't stop to look at the sky, they demand creation, they ask for art.
"Amanita muscaria" Digital collage, by Begoña Alarcón for Numero21 (2021).
A couple of months ago, without requesting the presence of the muses (because of course when you look for them they never come), they found me playing while digitising one of my favourite engravings. My thoughts wandered between travels and experiences, books read and the tower of them on my desk yet to be read. My imagination wandered so much that I soon fell, deeper and deeper, down an endless rabbit hole. An eternal spiral of unanswered questions. Full of surreal images, indescribable sounds, and an intense orange that absorbed me more and more.
I walked through mushrooms, goblins, and fields of flowers. The moon, the intensity of the colour, and the abstraction of the surroundings in my thoughts. I saw the tower of books still on my desk (yes, still to be read). And I saw Alice, not Alice per se, but her book among the many books stacked in the tower. And the rabbit hole, infinite, what would Alice be like if she existed at this point in history? It's the only thing I thought of at the end of my journey down the hole.
Well, that's what I capture in the play. Here is the fragment of that great literary work that inspired the collage:
So she was thinking (and thinking cost her some effort, for the heat of the day had made her drowsy and groggy) whether the pleasure of weaving a garland of daisies would compensate her for the labour of getting up and picking the daisies when suddenly a pink-eyed White Rabbit hopped near her.
There was nothing very extraordinary in this, nor did Alice think it very strange to hear the rabbit say to himself, "My God, my God, I'm going to be late!" (When she thought of it afterward, she decided that, of course, it must have surprised her very much, but at the time it seemed to her the most natural thing in the world). But when the rabbit took a pocket-watch out of his waistcoat, looked at it, and ran off, Alice jumped up, for she realized at once that she had never seen a rabbit in a waistcoat, or with a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she set off running after the rabbit across the meadow, and was just in time to see him dash into a burrow that opened at the foot of the hedge.
A moment later, Alice was also running into the burrow, without stopping to consider how she would manage to get out afterward.
And that, every time the muses visit (so suddenly and without warning), is how I feel when making art. Falling down the rabbit hole, in haste and without stopping to consider how I will manage later to get out.
Live artfully!
-Bego
Inside the collage is our #gravure "Mushrooms", you can find it here: https://www.numero21.shop/product-page/hongos #handmade
And in honour of the White Rabbit (our favourite character in the story), we have created a decorative wall clock with the image of "Mushrooms". Find it through Society6!
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