Encampment
Encampment (1989) is related to a series of hand-coloured black-and-white etchings entitled ‘The Nursery Rhymes’, made in collaboration with printer Professor Paul Coldwell of Culford Press. Storytelling is an integral theme within Rego’s practice. Often thought to be the domain of women and maintained through intergenerational oral traditions, folktales and nursery rhymes constitute intimate bonding rituals that are resistant to authority. Rego explains, ‘When I was a child in Portugal there was very much an oral tradition of storytelling — many of the tales related had never been written down. I cannot separate my own childhood from the imagined terrors and exquisite thrills of their robust imaginings.’ For Rego, the fairy tales give structure to this darkness with its concealed chaos - lurking in this particular etching in the shadows, the ‘imagined terrors’.
51¸£ÀûÉç the series, historian Marina Warner (1989) says of Rego: ‘Her sympathy with naiveté, her love of its double character, its weakness and its force, has led her to Nursery Rhymes as a new source for her imagery.’
