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metaFenella by artist Martin Firrell will celebrate the wit and wisdom of the 86-year-old Carry On Screaming star
Artist Martin Firrell has a new work coming out - his first since Complete Hero in 2009. He's setting out to capture the wonderful weirdness of Carry On Screaming 's Fenella Fielding . At 86, she is to be cast as an online oracle offering advice in a new artwork combining video portraiture, anecdote, double entendre and prophesy. It'll be an interactive video portrait launching at www.metafenella.com from midnight on Friday 14 March. Before then, Firrell encourages fans to lift the trailer and embed it in their own sites.
metaFenella official trailer from Martin Firrell Company on Vimeo .
"My father drove Fenella in the late 1970s," Firrell tells SFX . "We had seen Carry On Screaming on television and loved the whole campy drama of it, at the centre of which was Fielding's bossomy character Valeria Watt, of course. My father rather embroidered his story of driving her, making the real life Fielding resemble her vampish alter ego. When I decided I wanted to make a series of 'metaworks' which would offer advice about living well drawn from the lives of quirky, interesting, cultish people, I kept hearing Fenella Fielding's inimitable voice, and my father telling the story of driving a vamp answering her description through the London night."
Firrell, one of London’s most influential public artists, is often inspired by the actors and creators of science fiction. "As an artist, I am constantly intrigued by the eloquence and accessibility of sci-fi and fantasy and horror stories. I suppose, in truth, I wish that contemporary art had that same degree of confidence in dealing with complex and challenging topics (all too often, contemporary art feels entirely superficial - a quick joke or a shock, and that's your lot). Whereas a film like Carry On Screaming continues to entertain and provoke, asking questions like what is youth? What is it we lose as we age? What price might we pay to keep youth? Why is evil so often seductive?"
Find out more at www.metafenella.com .
