New Art with Hidden Secrets - Glow in the Dark Fairies

.The inspiration for my new glow in the dark series: The Cottingley Fairies

Once upon a time, two girls in Yorkshire captured the attention of the grown-up world with photographs of paper cut-out fairies and a camera.

In the summer of 1917, cousins, Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9), were playing near a stream behind Elsie’s home in Cottingley, a village in West Yorkshire, England. The girls said they often saw fairies there. To prove it, Elsie borrowed her father’s camera and took a photograph of Frances sitting by the stream with what appeared to be little winged fairies dancing in front of her.

A few months later, they took another photograph showing Elsie with a fairy. Both prints were developed by Elsie’s father, who assumed they were a joke, but Frances’s mother did not and showed them to members of the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist group interested in the supernatural.

The world, as it does, split in two. Some dismissed them as a hoax. Others thought them proof that we are not alone. 

Among the believers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock himself, had he been there, would have no doubt raised a more skeptical eyebrow.

Years later, in the 1980s, Elsie and Frances admitted what most had suspected: the fairies were cut-outs copied from a children’s book (Princess Mary's Gift Book) and held in place with pins. But Frances never let go entirely, she always insisted that the final photograph, The Fairy Bower, was real! 

Back in the day, the hoax was hard to prove, but today modern technology has spotted the pinholes, folds, and paper edges that reveal the fairies were crafted, not born.

I loved that story as a teenager, finding it in an old photography magazine. A century later, instead of cardboard wings, I've used glow paints that transform after dark to create a series inspired by the photographs . By day: A girl in violet dusk holds up her lantern and waits, because she knows what’s coming. By night: that’s when things happen. The glow-in-the-dark paint comes alive. Fairies stir. 

Fairies are shy things, and some only appear after you’ve switched off the lights...It’s been said that every time someone says “I don’t believe in fairies,” a tiny fairy drops down dead in some forgotten hedgerow. So be careful what you say!