Karolina Albricht & Lottie Stoddart I am hooked on fairy fruit
I am hooked on fairy fruit
Introduction
I am hooked on fairy fruit is a collaborative conversation between words and image by two artists, Karolina Albricht and Lottie Stoddart. In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky published Klänge (Sounds), a collection of his prose-poems interspersed with woodcuts, a book that was to become one of the most beautiful examples of the early twentieth century “artist’s book.” 112 years later, Albricht and Stoddart have created an artist book. This is a project initiated from a perfect storm of circumstances; a close friendship born of studying together; a mutual admiration for the other’s practice; but perhaps most importantly, of a shared residency experience in Norfolk. Both artists stayed at High House around Easter time, Stoddart in 2019 and Albricht in 2024, providing a common seasonal experience with a deep engagement of the surrounding Norfolk landscape. Albricht’s monoprints were a new foray into explorative printmaking and it is these prints that have become the seeds of each and every one of Stoddart’s literary responses.
I am hooked on fairy fruit
It was only last week (or perhaps before or after) that I was offered a piece of plump and rosy fairy fruit.
If you can imagine freefalling into an extremely high budget and utterly immersive advertisement; one where bursts of colour and sound encircle your senses; sprays of juice fan in slow motion past your nose; droplets bounce off succulent surfaces, the sweetest aromas pierce your very soul - that is what I was contending with.
I was hooked.
And I knew, in some deep and buried part of me, that I should have turned it down, knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I, like so many, have been told since childhood that once you partake of fairy fruit there is no way back from it. You become part of the dance and you long only to taste it again. It is a drug that robs you of ambition or sense for anything other than sinking your teeth into the fruit’s flesh, of feeling the juice spill down your chin and over your fingers.
I no longer remember what I wanted for my life before the fruit, but I do know that were I to be offered it again for the first time, I would take it.