Strange Tales, my latest solo exhibition, has just opened at Despard Gallery, Tasmania, and will be on show until the 31st May (my birthday!) Although the show is mainly paintings and drawings, I’ve included three artist’s books, once of which is the subject of this post.

‘Sirena: a love story’ was partly inspired by a Helen Tiffin journal article, published in Southerly, ‘Animal writes: ethics, Experiments and Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish’. And partly by the mermaid on the front of the Sirena tuna tin (what a babe).

Sirena is a re-telling of the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. I remember being impressed as a child by its gruesome warning that if the lovestruck mermaid walked on dry land it would feel like a thousand knives stabbing into the soles of her feet.

My version of this classic tale of love and self abnegation is set in the Tasmanian highlands. A middle aged couple experiencing marital difficulties rent a luxurious chalet in the hope of sorting out their differences. Their problems escalate when one evening the wife is transformed into a beautiful Atlantic salmon, albeit one who retains the ability to communicate with her husband.

(The book’s title page: dedicated to a dear friend, a wonderful artist currently battling cancer).

Sirena is thus an inter-species love story, a black farce, and a modern comedy of marital manners. I took from Tiffin’s description of ‘Wish’ the idea that an exploration of the relationship between humans and animals could be both deeply serious and riotously funny. I know other writers are working with this idea: I was listening to Radio National the other day and there was this great broadcast of a short story, ‘Me and Run Like A Dream’, by Melbourne’s Elizabeth Reale, about a woman who falls in love with a racehorse.

One of the best things about the reading was that the frequent repetitions of the horse’s name, Run Like A Dream, echoed the sound of a race being called. And some other crackers: the overlay of a conventional suburban love trajectory onto a highly improbable series of events (the courtship between woman and horse, meeting with her parents, marriage, birth of first child- apparently very painful etc). All told in this deadpan, irony free style that segued in and out of the romance novel genre: great stuff!

Here’s an image from Sirena: the night before the wife’s transformation from human to salmon.

A page from the Sirena book showing the wife encountering her new face in the mirror (a play on a hackneyed literary device).

The metamorphosis from human to fish continues…

The husband, who works as a marine biologist, saves his wife’s life by putting her into a salted bathtub. When the water becomes silted he rushes to the nearest town to buy aquarium bubblers.

His greatest fear is that his wife will end up as a specimen and subject of multiple experiments. I’m currently doing a PhD so I couldn’t resist throwing in a few jokes about Ethics approval, probably only funny for .01% of the population.

In happier times, a revised page from the couple’s wedding album.

Another human/fish illustration.

The ‘centrefold’ image.

The husband plans to transport his fish wife to a Tasmanian salmon farm.

A page inspired by Escher and Japanese paper.

A full moon on the night that Sirena pleads with her husband to set her free.

A couple of people asked me for a copy of the story, so here it is. I must admit that it probably needs a good edit, but I like the premise and enjoyed writing it. Happy to hear your thoughts!

Sirena