Next to the key, Alice pulled back the curtains and found a small doll-sized door that would bring her into wonderland. John Tenniel's original illustration is a picture of the Apocalypse, a magic moment with the little girl's curiosity in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure Wonderlandoriginally published in 1865. It was Tenniel who first saw the heroine in her famous Puff Sheeved Pinafore dress and pump.
Since then, the artist has reacted with greater freedom to the author’s confusing imagery, and the form of a book is unlimited. Alice, as well as the entire curious character, are shipped to full-color paintings, public domain sculptures and playful collages. But why is this story so lasting appeal, what can we find in its weird symbolism?
From the 1930s, Carroll's illogical fantasy world inspired the surrealists directly, Eileen Agar admiredly, the author is “the mysterious master of time and imagination.” Salvador Dalí portrays Alice as a girlish muse, innocently traveling through nonsense and breaking into the realm of unconsciousness in his illustrations to write a special edition of the book.
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Meanwhile, René Magritte Alice in Wonderland1946. He challenges the line between dreams and reality, inviting the audience into a hazy anthropomorphic, anthropomorphic woodland where surreality sprouts in trees and floating pears, both with faces.
By the 1950s, Alice entered our collective consciousness, making appearances in the pop art of Peter Blake and Sigmar Polke. It was during this time that Mary Blair created concept art for Walt Disney's 1951 animated film. Amid the ever-changing backdrop of color enhancement, Alice appeared before the family audience in an iconic blue dress.
For several artists, including painter Roxana Halls, the outfit has always been a starting point. She was greatly influenced by the movie and made scenes in the studio with models, props, wigs and costumes. Wearing a complete Disney costume, a rude-looking heroine wears it Alice Staircase2013. Including eight canvases linked to each other, two stories are told in opposite directions –Alice in Wonderland When you go down By looking at the glass As you walk up, center the final paragraph of each story session.
In this intentional topty narrative, Alice finds herself framed by an interesting symbolic, soft gate passageway Tears2013. As the artist told the observer: “Alice is smart, she is curious, she opens every door and may not want her and venture into those territory that are unwilling to admit her.”
Alice belongs to the wider range of willful women who are found laughing in the dramatic paintings in the hall. Here, the little girl consumes magic potions and cakes, visible in the picture, just like the consequences of their size change. “Like any real adventurer, when there is a cake, she is also very curious when she says I eat me and a bottle that says I drink my, and she can’t taste them.”
Throughout the stairs, she deliberately subverts the heroine: “Alice is often inappropriate, not self-verified impossible: not afraid of authority, but asks every question, regardless of her etiquette, often laughing at the ridiculous answers she receives.”
By contrast, Marzena Ablewska-Lech shows the character in the moment of reflection, despite once again wearing Disney-style outfits Dress No. 12024. As Alice lifted her full skirt, the light grabbed the glittering blue fabric, she seemed to seek answers from it. Its folds and twists are like the lines of a map – Alice will need it when she moves in childhood and adulthood.
The artist draws on psychoanalytic readings that emphasize that the story stems from truth about growth. “Since the time of recording began, even earlier fairy tales were a means of conquering human terror through metaphors,” wrote scholar Jack Zipes, who wrote that Carroll's vision of Alice's growth and shrinking vision on the journey is interpreted as a narrative of the arrival of female artists.
“In Alice, there is a beautiful teenage weird feeling when her body starts to change rapidly,” Ablewska-Lech told Observer. “I’m considering growing up in a body with acne, limbs too long and breasts growing.” By focusing on clothing, she asked about “the relationship between girls and women and their own bodies,” including her own. The artist experienced perimenopause symptoms while painting the photo and felt that she was “wearing a strange, totally ill-fitting outfit.”
This theme continues in Gaby Roberts Delton's painting Queen of Hearts2018-19, she used it as an opponent of the story. In fairy tales, older women are often portrayed as dangerous witches and evil witches, but Roberts-Dalton complicates images of evil female characters, inviting her new ways to portray the raging hot girl queen in her.
The sympathetic figure stared cautiously at the audience, looking less tyrannical than the vulnerable, bound with white cloth, while the red heart appeared on a sanitary towel on the wall behind her. This is a self-portrait. “The King of Love is a crazy character, and menopause caused my brain fog and crazy feeling,” the artist told Observer. “But she is also a powerful old woman. I use a red heart to represent the passing of time, and the monthly cycles and menstruation become the trophy for women's lives.”
Although her character is bound like a wound, the end of the cloth becomes a wing, representing what the artist calls “free change with age.” By subverting images of Carroll's turbulent rulers, Roberts-Dalton shows her personal experience and explores a wider theme of female aging.
For Kiki Smith Prophet (Alice II)2005. Painted in pure white, a huge, surreal scale little girl evokes Tenniel's illustrations and her ever-changing original story.
Alice kneeled on the earth, her subtle arms stretched downward, seemingly closely connected to nature, almost like rebirth from it. Given her contemplative posture, the character embodies a spirit, otherworldly qualities. Her external stillness contrasts with her inner inner feeling and active thoughts: what did she see when she stared into the distance?
Yayoi Kusama also brought the audience into Alice's mind, and since 2012, her charming illustrations are covered in wonderland with her special dots and psychedelic colors. From childhood, Japanese artists saw the world in a surreal hallucinatory way, thus viewing Carol's universe as a space for self-expression and metaphor for mental illness. She said, “I, Kusama, are modern Alice in Wonderland.”
As we age, the various illustrations of the book become physical materials that Corwin Levi absorbs his intricate retro-quality collage. for Ears, beards and watchesIn 2025, he collected and collaged more than fifty illustrations of the White Rabbit from the Golden Age. Each repetitive character is dressed slightly differently, running forward in a clock-shaped circle.
By mixing descriptions of cultures around the world, Levi’s exquisitely layered collages demonstrate how timeless a fairy tale is, and through each retelling, there are endless possibilities to develop. The artist produced a sophisticated visual outline that shapes what he calls “a cycle of exploring the concepts of time, journey and destination.”
It is the destination of the Infinite Playground Wonderland, and it continues to attract artists. “This is where we visit, linger and draw inspiration – it is an inner space that explores the edges of human possibilities and imagination,” Levi told Observer. “Anyone can, if they allow themselves to travel to fields including wonderlands, wander around, if travelers are generous, come back and translate their experiences for the rest of us.”
When we enter the decisions that generate AI, algorithms and data-led, human imagination and creativity must be prioritized because it is in Wonderland. Without a fixed meaning, Carol's dream narrative continues to allow the artist's space and freedom to draw on its surreal symbolism, adult narratives, puns and puzzles to play its own meaning from a story about the story or nonsense. Alice will continue to wander in wonderland as long as there is an artist.
