20Oct
Thankyou Gail Middleton! Gail made one of those deep impacts when she arrived on the West Wight scene in the early 2000s - not only is she a very beautiful ex-model, but she has an eidetic memory too! And she was a fashion (knitware) designer and a bibliophile as wel! And she was immediately taken with Dimbola and the stories of Julia Cameron's friendship and acquaintance with the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) - and the fact that both Dodgson and Alice Liddell had summer houses here in Freshwater Bay. Leave the rest to Gail's imaginative re-interpretations of local cultural history, and her ability to illustrate these beautifully - and you end up not only with a book (above) but with a re-conceptualisation of the Dimbola Tearoom along the Wonderland theme.
Bob Seely and Gail Middleton at Mrs Middleton's bookshop, Freshwater recently. Lots more to come on Gail, who has a creative background as a fashion-designer, knitware designer and author/illustrator and runs an importsnt bookshop in Freshwater.
Gail and me on the way back from a Robyn Hitchcock 2015 gig at Sandown - Mary took the photo - thats Mary and Gail below
Gail, with a delightful mix of excellent scholarship and vivid imagination creates her book The Freshwater Circle Through the Looking Glass - and what Lewis Carroll Found There (2013) - and in a signed limited-edition of 500 too (I've got number 94). This blend of academic and local research and imaginative interpretation is her hallmark, as is her ability to repurpose and re-interpret in colour existing illustrations of Tenniel's and Dodgson's - the integration of Dodgson's experiences trying to infiltrate the Freshwater Circle, combined with his helping Julia Cameron learn the Wet Collodion process, and working on Through The Looking Glass, make this a wonderful fabrication...
So your project here is make stories, plays or fantasias celebrating a West Wight celebrity - there are lots to choose from - and how they are embedded in the glorious West Wight environment - the landscape, seascape and variegated coastline, woodland, forestry and downland, marshland (wetland), coastal paths - and even drone/aerial paragliding/ ballooning, Birds-eye and map-views of the West Wight..
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