The Princess and The Pea
(in miniature)

The Princess and the Pea was a collaboration with Australian artist and photographer Polly Borland. Polly is an acclaimed artist and portrait photographer, her work is exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. Many of the people she photographs are cultural icons but she also documents the extraordinary lives of so called ordinary people, capturing scenes in such a way that a person seems to become a still-life, and washing pegged on a line, a portrait. It was these intriguing photographic stories that so interested me. Together we created a fairytale set in a miniature 3-dimensional world.

The Story

This is my retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, about a girl who is discovered to be a ‘real’ princess when a pea placed under twelve feather mattresses leads to a very uncomfortable night. I added a few twists – the main one being that I gave the girl good manners because I could never swallow the idea that this fairytale princess could be quite so rude. Unusually for me, I wrote the story very quickly – I began writing while eating dinner alone in a Manhattan restaurant and I finished it the next day.

Making the Sets 

I had to make eighteen tiny theatre sets. I created the panelled rooms using layers of card cut from cornflake packets, glued this to picture board and then painted. I drew, painted and cut-out figures, then dressed the characters in layers of patterned paper. I tracked down suitable doll's house furniture and objects – anything I couldn't find, I made, such as the bed with its twelve mattresses. Other things I commissioned, like the food on the breakfast table and the bowl of peas. The crystal chandelier in the princess's bedroom actually lights up as do the candle sticks. Everything was such a fiddly size that objects had to be pushed into place with tweezers. But, as in most doll's houses, not everything here is to scale. This reminds you that the sets are not real nor are they perfect models but instead a stranger and more childlike world – this oddness of proportion lends a fairytale-like feel to the whole. 

Shooting the pictures

Polly first took polaroids so we could check that we were happy with the set-up and the lighting and make sure nothing was out of place. She then shot many roles of film, adjusting camera exposure, angles and lighting so we had many images to compare. It was sometimes incredibly difficult to choose one image over another since each picture offers a slightly different depth, mood and detail.

Lighting

The joy of working with a photographer like Polly is her ability to capture a moment – so you can almost imagine the characters have just walked into the room. Each set was carefully lit by Polly to conjure mood and atmosphere. Polly describes her job as ‘breathing life’ into these little miniature scenes.