Goblin Diorama Completed

Better late than never.   As regular readers know, I actually started the diorama early in the year.  However, a plumbing disaster caused me to pause for a while because we had to do some major rebuilding on the lower floor of the house.  Then, I decided to enter an art competition and spent many hours working on another project.  We also made quite a few trips to the cabin, as we are doing a floor to ceiling renovation up there.  This project took a back seat to all of those projects, so I guess I am actually lucky that I was able to complete it this year.

When I began the project, I had blogged that the inspiration for this project was a poem and a book of ghost stories.  The poem was "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley.  It was a poem written about a real, and very scary event.  At one time there was something in this country called Orphan Trains.  Poor people were starving in overcrowded tenements.  War and Spanish Influenza (which we now know as a form of bird flu)  had left the country with thousands of orphans.  In an effort to give the orphaned children a home, they were placed on trains and sent out west to live with farmers.  Many of the orphans had successful placements and grew up to do great things.  For some, the situation was a living horror story.  The poem, "Little Orphant Annie"
was written about an orphan girl who came to live with a family.  She was an immigrant child or a child of immigrant parents, and shared her ghost stories and folk tales from the old country with her new family in the evening.  The poem has a refrain, (I am paraphrasing here, as it is written in dialect) "And the goblins will get you if you don't watch out!"  That part of the poem was the inspiration for creating a Halloween themed diorama featuring Goblins.

The book that also helped to inspire the diorama was called "Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories."   The author's name was M.R. James.  The stories were set in the last century in England.  They are stories of ghosts, creepy creatures, and things that go bump in the night.  These stories differ from modern day stories in one aspect that is intuited rather than being pointed out.  In modern stories, the story seems to carry a reason why the event in the stories took place.  For example: in a hack and slash modern horror story the bad guy in the story might have been someone that was bullied or injured by someone in the story; or the event was caused by some action that was taken by one of the characters in the story.  In many of these Old World stories, the ghosts or scary creatures were there independent of any action taken by the character(s).  The ghosts or creatures were just there.  There was a separation of cause and effect, which lends to the horror in that the protagonist had little or no control over events  and could do little to ameliorate the effects that the creatures had on them.  So those creepy creatures made it into the diorama in the form of Goblins.

It was a bit of a coincidence that I ran across the book of ghost stories at the library.  I was actually researching how to make molds for casting plaster. The book popped up in the search because the title contained the word casting.  I had to check it out.  Who doesn't like a good ghost story once in a while?

I tried to incorporate a lot of symbolism in this piece.  Earlier blog posts go into the symbolism of the
house and the ravens.  To recap it here, to view the abandoned dilapidated house is to be confronted with fears of loss and fears of aging and abandonment.  The ravens represent our fears of our own inevitable demise.  There are ghosts on the trees.  One has a very human form, and may represent the former owner of the property, or the energy that the person had expended on the property.  The ghosts on the other tree do not have human form and are spirits or energies that have an effect us.  Perhaps the Goblins in the diorama are not just creepy creatures, but also represent the events in life over which we have no control.

Field 12-07-2014

The last piece I added to the diorama was the child dressed in his Halloween costume of a clown.  He stands viewing the old   abandoned house, the Goblins, the ghosts on the trees, and the ravens.  He is holding his arms out like a balance.  On one side he holds a Halloween staple, the candy carriers shaped like a pumpkin.  In the other hand he holds a fallen leaf.  He is existing as we all do; somewhere between the fun we make of death and dying at Halloween and the reality of the eventual end to our existence.  The diorama tells the story of a child coming to terms with the realities of our world and all that we must face as we travel through life as he contemplates the abandoned house.

The child's costume is that of the clown.  In one aspect he represents the clown or fool of a court in the Middle Ages.  The clown, or "Fool" as he was called was allowed to speak truths to the king or nobleman that other people could not or would not say to him.  In the diorama, this represents the taboo or uncomfortable feelings we have about speaking of this subject. 

In tarot, the Fool, is an interesting subject open to many interpretations.  Unlike the other cards of the Major Arcana, the card of the Fool is not numbered.  Some students of the tarot think the Fool should be at the beginning of the deck and interpreted as a person beginning a journey (or going through life).  Others think this card should be at the end and interpreted as someone who has passed through many events in life and now understands how little he or she really knows.  This person is now ready to continue on the journey with a new understanding of how little he or she really knows.  In other words, with a new perspective on how to continue on with the journey, hopefully on a higher spiritual plane than previously.

When I make a diorama, I like to tell a story, but also leave the viewer with questions.  As the viewer comes up with questions, the story unfolds in new ways as they try to answer them.  For example: Was the house abandoned and Goblins showed up when the place was empty, or was the house abandoned because of the Goblins?  Or: How did the window get broken?  As the viewer asks the questions, something is added to the story that can't be answered through the visual information provided.  The viewer has a mystery to which he or she can fill in the blanks with his or her own story.

So there you have it.  The new diorama.  Throughout the making of the diorama I have been using the working title: Goblin Halloween Diorama.  Now that it is complete, I have decided that the projects title will be Goblins Will Get You.

Today is Sunday, so it is time for a new field project picture.  Today's picture was taken at 9:10 am.  The temperature was forty-one degrees Fahrenheit.  Winds were from the North North East at fifteen miles per hour.