"Alice" by Cristina Lucas

Installation by Cristina Lucas /  Photo by Luis Durán

Art installation "Alice" by Spanish artist Cristina Lucas is displayed in the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art in the Andalusian capital of Seville, southern Spain April 10, 2013.

Installation by Cristina Lucas /  Photo by Luis Durán

Installation by Cristina Lucas /  Photo by Luis Durán

"Cristina Lucas started out in the field of action art and happenings and later moved on to develop installation art, photography, video, drawing, etc. Focusing on critiques related to gender and cultural and power structures, she uses metaphors and satire to inspire ambiguous feelings in her viewers, always from an apparently innocent feminist point of view. 

The installation Alice presents a gigantic figure whose face and right arm protrude from the open windows of a room in which she seems to have been trapped. The artist's inspiration for this piece is her reinterpretation of the passage in Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland where the main character, driven by curiosity, eats a cake with the words "EAT ME" written across it and begins to grow uncontrollably, in this case to the point that she no longer fits in the room and is forced to stick one arm through a window. Cristina's aim was to bring the book's unsettling fantasy into the real world and use it as a metaphor for the physical and mental imprisonment of women as a form of oppression, trapped within the confines of their homes. 

 This work was created for the show entitled El patio de mi casa. Arte contemporáneo en 16 patios de Córdoba (October-November 2009), for which each participating artist designed an intervention in one of Córdoba's famous interior courtyards. Cristina Lucas' piece, one of the most highly praised in the exhibition, presented the typical Córdoba courtyard as a "gilded cage" for women, thereby criticizing this negative aspect of a tradition that dates back to Islamic times."

site