The Wild Hunt
For my project on Body, Identity and Character, I focused on the myth of The Wild Hunt to create a sculpture of a spirit and an A2 editorial illustration as a visual representation of the mythical creature and to portray the storyline of the hunt. I am interested in Norse mythology and how one story can not only include all these different creatures but also have so many variations of it over time, place and culture. The myth of The Wild Hunt tells the story of hunters travelling by storms and collecting souls, riding horses and accompanied by ghostly dogs.
I was fascinated by the variety of tales and how they have been modernised over time – from historical art sources such as paintings by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1872) to characters in contemporary TV series Teen Wolf (2017) and the 2017 film Thor: Ragnarok. Whilst creating my spirit, I used my research as inspiration to ensure that the facial structure of my sculpture was correct but also the features gave a clear expression of evil but still kept to the traditional elements of the myth. Then finalising it all once I had experimented with a variety of styles, colours and creating a texture board to see what would work best for the final sculpture.
Keeping this same process with my editorial illustration, I was inspired by contemporary illustrator Maria Popova’s work The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: 130 Years of Illustrations (2011). I looked at a range of different settings, colours and compositions of landscapes, mountains and castles, to make sure that the illustration would not only work with Greenberg’s (2020) text I had found but also the surroundings, colour tones and narrative to convey the mood and the setting and the atmosphere of The Wild Hunt.
