Come Away From Her
Kiki Smith, 2003Come Away from Her is based on a manuscript drawing by Lewis Carroll for his book Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864). At this point in his story, friendly birds fly off when Alice talks about what her cat likes to eat. In Kiki Smith’s prints based on fairytales, childhood vulnerability and innocence like Alice’s can be imbued with a sense of the sexual awakening that accompanies adolescence, and the animals sometimes shown with young girls suggest underlying forces of nature. Here we witness a cryptic scene, as Alice watches winged forms, some of them with incongruous limbs, fly away from her.
