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- The Guardian, Saturday 16 July 2011
- Article history
Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the GuardianFive floors above Liverpool Street, in central London, at the top of a non-descript office block, is the workshop of Gavin Turk and his partner, Deborah Curtis. It is from here that they manage their House of Fairy Tales project, the travelling art circus appearing at this year's Camp Bestival in Dorset.
One would perhaps expect the hub of a pair of noted artists to be alive with the throb of visible creativity: paints, canvasses, a few easels, perhaps some Fairy Tale paraphernalia. There is, admittedly, a little of the latter – a chair on which a card reads: THIS IS A WORK OF ART, DO NOT SIT!, and a few snapshots of previous events – but not much else. Instead, it resembles an office space that has fallen victim to the credit crunch: empty, forgotten, forlorn.
But much of their work is in storage. An awful lot of space is needed for the House of Fairy Tales these days.
"Last year we took 180 people to Bestival," says Curtis, a serene, and self-confessed modern-day hippie, "and this year it'll be closer to 200. It's a pretty big operation."
"And it's getting bigger all the time," adds Turk, 43, a noticeably less serene individual, who, with his shaved head and intense light blue-eyed stare, is brasher and more forthright.
They started the House of Fairy Tales in 2006 essentially as a sideline to entertain their three children and those in their neighbourhood. But it has developed a life of its own.
Read the full article on guardian.co.uk
"....Curtis then set up Supernova, an arts-based day centre for primary school children, and it was from this seed that the House of Fairy Tales grew.
"We started as a one-off event at the Port Eliot literary festival, and it was basically a workshop for kids," says Turk, "though I don't like that term, because I don't like shops and I don't like work. But it was a way to interest children in all sorts of subjects – art, science, history, ecology – in a collaborative way and in the hope of getting them engaged in ways they wouldn't have done in a normal classroom."
It worked. More one-off events followed and for the past few years now they have been a regular at Camp Bestival.
One enters House of Fairy Tales by walking through an arched gate into what Turk describes as a "parallel universe". Here, children are encouraged to develop strands of their personalities they might not previously have realised existed – as alchemists, extremists, illusionists, surrealists – and where fact and fiction, right and wrong merge.
"It's where anything is possible," says Curtis. "If you think about it, a festival is a fantastic place for kids, as long as you are prepared to let go of some of your basic parenting ideals. In other words, hygiene, teeth cleaning, and bedtime goes out the window. But they are in a loving, and very community-based, environment, where everybody watches out for everybody else's kids."...
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