Vikings Sail South is part of a collection called Fruit Follies, which is meant as "a playful tongue-in-cheek poke" at still life compositions which often depict a fruit bowl or fresh-cut flowers in a vase of some kind. I'm playing with the idea of still life putting it in some absurd context as a way to bring awareness to the novelty of the subject. Vikings Sail South, for example, is set in a theme of what would it be like if you were a Viking seafarer sailing south for the first time and discovering citrus fruit. The idea that these fruits would have been highly prized to warrant a kingly presentation of them in a bowl as a sort of treasure is to remind the viewer of what we today take so much for granted.
I am prompted in creating this piece in the wonder I felt from the energy of my father when he first related the story to me as a child about when as a teenager in the 1940s he witnessed the first orange arrive in Ireland. It was just after the second world war and the ending of rations and the excitment the simple presence of an orange in someone's fruit bowl conjured up. My father communicated a felt-sense of how marvelous it felt to him to hold something so exotic in the palm of his hand.
Fruit Follies
Works >> Fruit Follies >> Vikings Sail South
Vikings Sail South
![Vikings Sail South by Alice Kunst](images/VikingsSailSouth-webA.jpg)
Title: Vikings Sail South
original 12"x9" felt ink pen
on 60lb 98GSM acid free paper
2020
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