At Tacit Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia, artist Irene Wellm crafts a fairytale in a paper collage installation titled “Mundus Imaginalis.” Painted with gouache, the surreal images resemble paper dolls of mythological characters. The artist said she was inspired by the narratives of the Grimm Brothers in creating the works, which start as digital collage and are then scaled and painted in monochrome. The exhibit runs through Dec. 18 at the gallery.
The artist says that she likes to be ambiguous in the work, blending abstraction and a realist method. She describes her three-month process and the reason behind the 10-foot-tall size of the creations: “The idea possessed me to create a walk-in experience of how I wanted to feel being towered over, ‘walking with the gods,’” Wellm says. “It has been a chance to stretch my oeuvre, to play with ideas that have been playing with me on the periphery of my picture making days as I was working in my studio, having started to feel that I would like to do something more.”
The show is influenced by the Sufi idea of “Mundus Imaginalis,” the artist says. “One might describe this today as the collective unconscious containing the archetypal forms of the psyche.”