MAGIC CARPET FLY
WE LIVE IN A TIME OF ENCHANTMENT
Magic Carpet Fly uses the game of Snakes & Ladders as a metaphor for luck, resilience, transformation, and the unexpected routes our lives take.
We climb towards love, success, friendship and purpose, only to be brought low by illness, loss, bad luck, division or war. Yet alongside these descents exist extraordinary moments of beauty and wonder: wild birds and animals, forests and rivers, clouds, stars and changing seasons. Music, art, literature and dance. Acts of courage, generosity and kindness. Wonders of science and imagination.
We live in a time of enchantment.
Magic Carpet Fly is an invitation to reflect on the unpredictable journey of life and the small rituals that help us navigate it. In the face of ultimate powerlessness, we can still choose where to turn our gaze: a translucent blade of grass, dew suspended on a spider's web, gnats dancing in sunlight. We can notice the quiet acts of care and altruism around us every day.
Beauty, in all its forms, may not save us from suffering. But it may save the world, because the desire for it is common to us all.
“I’ve long been a fan of games as a route back to childhood memories and a simple device for human connection. We are in our bodies, in this moment, together, having fun. Their apparent simplicity so often sits alongside the greatest themes; life, death, randomness, choices, success, disappointment, the journey. The paintings sit with this idea of multiplicity. We can be lots of things at once.” (Alice)
“All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate… implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother.”
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children.
