"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
— Carl Sagan
You have come to the first page.
Before anything here had a name, there was only darkness, and dust drifting through it: the ash of stars that burned out long before any world was born. Then light came into the dark, and the dust began to remember. Colour gathered into form, sparks settled into skin, and out of the nebula rose the first of them.
He was not born. He was made. He has a head and shoulders, a collar of glass beads, a thread of blue down the centre of his face, and no body yet: the world he will guard has not been built. He has a single eye. Where the other should be there is only a smooth hollow, and the eye he does have is a crystal, cut like a gem, through which the universe looks back at itself. He does not need to see everything. He needs only to see true.
Look closely and you will find a seam at his throat, where he was cut free from the darkness. Nothing made by hand is without a seam. It is the signature of the maker.
He is the first to meet you. Everything that follows was made the way he was. Before you go further, take three keys.
I. The Light. Every work in this collection is a single photograph captured in camera, at night or by day, with real light falling on real things. No layers, no compositing, no generated pixels. What you see happened in front of the lens.
II. The Land. My Wonderland is not only a name; it is a place. Most of its worlds were found on one piece of land, around a house the artist built with his own hands, together with his father, over the same years in which the collection itself was built. Sometimes he goes beyond the fence, into the fields and the forest, and brings back trophies from afar; but the road always leads home. The house grew room by room as the collection grew work by work. The land feeds the art, and the art gives the land its legends: the imagined world comes out of the real one, answers it and completes it. The creatures come from there, most often from beside a pond that keeps opening like a gate.
III. The Story. The works are chapters. The early ones stand alone, each a parable of its own. Then they begin to call to one another: an hourglass, a mask, a pair of shears passing from hand to hand. Read each text to its end; some close with a key to another work. Out of them grows the Dark Fantasy Saga, a visual novel told on chain, and it is still being written.
Welcome to My Wonderland.
Genesis. The first work of the collection on SuperRare, and the first animated effigy: from this head descends the whole kingdom of effigies of the Dark Fantasy Saga. Minted on Ethereum, where the artist has remained from the first day.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2022.)
