Key in hand, Alice pulls back the curtain to find the tiny, doll-sized door that will lead her to Wonderland. John Tenniel’s original illustration is a picture of revelation, a moment of magic, as the little girl’s curiosity grows in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, originally published in 1865. It was Tenniel who first visualized the heroine in her famous puff-sleeved pinafore dress and pumps.
Since then, artists have responded to the author’s puzzling imagery with even greater freedom, unbound by the format of a book. Alice, along with a whole cast of curious characters, has been transported to full-color paintings, public realm sculptures and playful collages. But why has this tale held such enduring appeal, and what meanings can we find in its strange symbolism?
From the 1930s, Carroll’s illogical fantasyland directly inspired the Surrealists, with Eileen Agar writing in admiration that the author was a “mysterious master of time and imagination.” Salvador Dalí painted Alice as a girlish muse, skipping innocently through the nonsense world and journeying into realms of the unconscious in his illustrations for a special edition of the book.
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Meanwhile, René Magritte was more deeply influenced by the tale’s absurd landscape for his canvas Alice in Wonderland, 1946. Challenging the boundaries between dreams and reality, he invites viewers into a hazy-colored, anthropomorphic woodland, where surreality sprouts from trees and floating pears, both of which have faces.
By the 1950s, Alice had entered our collective consciousness, making appearances in the Pop Art of Peter Blake and Sigmar Polke. It was also during this period that Mary Blair worked on the concept art for Walt Disney’s animated film of 1951. Against a kaleidoscopic background of heightened color contrasts, Alice emerged before family audiences in her iconic blue dress.
This outfit has been a starting point for several artists, including painter Roxana Halls. Heavily influenced by cinema, she enacts scenes with models, props, wigs and costumes inside her studio. Dressed in full Disney garb, an impertinent-looking heroine climbs through The ALICE Staircase, 2013. Comprising eight interlinking canvases, two stories are told in opposite directions—Alice in Wonderland as you walk down and Through the Looking Glass as you walk up, the culminating passages of each tale meeting at the centre.
Among this deliberately topsy-turvy narrative, Alice finds herself framed by an intriguing passageway of symbolic, pastel-colored doors in The Pool of Tears, 2013. As the artist tells Observer: “Alice is smart and she is boundlessly curious, she prises open every door which might not wish to permit her and ventures into territories which would rather not admit her.”
Alice belongs to a wider cast of wayward women who are found laughing and eating their way through Halls’ theatrical paintings. Here, the little girl has consumed the magical potion and cake, visible in the picture, just like their size-shifting consequences. “As would any true adventurer, when presented with a cake which says Eat Me and a bottle which says Drink Me, she is far too wilfully inquisitive not to taste them,” says Halls.
Throughout the staircase, she presents the heroine in deliberately subversive terms: “Alice is often inappropriate and immune to self-censure: having no fear of authority, she instead asks every question which occurs to her regardless of propriety, frequently scorning the preposterous answers she receives in return.”
In contrast, Marzena Ablewska-Lech shows the character in more reflective moments, although again wearing a Disney-inspired outfit in Dress No 1, 2024. As Alice holds up her full skirt, light catches the shimmering blue fabric, from which she seems to seek answers. Its folds meander like the lines of a map—one which Alice will need as she moves between childhood and adulthood.
This artist has drawn on psychoanalytic readings that stress that the tale is rooted in truths about growing up. Scholar Jack Zipes has written, “Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor,” and Carroll’s visions of Alice growing and shrinking while going on a journey have been interpreted as a coming-of-age narrative by women artists in particular.
“In Alice, there is a beautiful sense of teenage oddity when her body starts rapidly transforming,” Ablewska-Lech tells Observer. “I was thinking about growing up in a body which serves you periods, acne, too long limbs and growing breasts.” By focusing on costumes, she interrogates “the relationship girls and women have with their bodies,” including her own. Experiencing perimenopause symptoms while painting this picture, the artist felt that she was “living in a strange, completely not fitted dress.”
This theme continues in Gabby Roberts-Dalton’s painting Queen of Hearts, 2018-19, for which she has taken as her muse the story’s antagonist. In fairy tales, older women are typically pictured as dangerous witches and evil hags, but Roberts-Dalton complicates the imagery of wicked female characters, inviting new ways of looking at the raging Queen of Hearts in her depiction.
Staring warily at the viewer, this sympathetic figure appears less tyrannical than vulnerable, bandaged in strips of white cloth, while red hearts appear on a line of sanitary towels stacked on the wall behind her. This is a self-portrait of sorts. “The Queen of Hearts is a mad character, and the menopause has induced feelings of brain fog and madness in me,” the artist tells Observer. “But she’s also an elder woman of strength. I use red hearts to represent time passing, the monthly cycle and menstruation becoming a trophy of a female’s life.”
While her character has been bound, like a wound, the ends of the cloth transform into wings that represent what the artist refers to as “the freeing change that comes with age.” By subverting images of Carroll’s volatile ruler, Roberts-Dalton manifests her personal experiences and explores the wider theme of women ageing.
Women’s lives are also a significant subject for Kiki Smith, who merges archetypical characters from myth and fairy tales in a multimedia practice that includes huge public sculptures such as Seer (Alice II), 2005. Painted pure white, the little girl of enormous, surreal scale evokes Tenniel’s illustrations and the original tale in which she keeps changing size.
Kneeling in the earth, delicate arms stretching downwards, Alice appears deeply connected to nature, almost as if she’s been reborn from it. Given her contemplative pose, the character embodies a spiritual, otherworldly quality. Appearing as a visionary seer, her outward stillness contrasts with the sense of interiority and active mind: as she gazes into the distance, what has she seen?
Yayoi Kusama, too, takes viewers inside Alice’s mind with her set of captivating illustrations from 2012, in which Wonderland is covered with her characteristic polka dots and psychedelic colors. Since childhood, the Japanese artist has seen the world in a surreal, hallucinogenic way, thus turning to Carroll’s universe as a space for self-expression and a metaphor for mental illness. Identifying with the heroine, she’s said, “I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.”
Altered by artists through the ages, the book’s diverse illustrations have become the physical material that Corwin Levi assimilates into his intricate, vintage-quality collages. For Ears, Whiskers, and Watches, 2025, he collected and collaged together more than fifty Golden Age White Rabbit illustrations; each repeated character, dressed slightly differently, runs forward in a clock-shaped, circular composition.
By remixing depictions from cultures around the world, Levi’s beautifully layered collage proves how fairy tales are simultaneously timeless and evolve through each retelling, with endless possibilities. Crafting an exquisite visual compendium, the artist has fashioned what he refers to as “a loop exploring concepts of time, journey and destination.”
It is the destination of Wonderland, an infinite playground, which continues to attract artists. “It’s a place for us to visit, linger, and draw inspiration from—it is a visceral space exploring the edges of human possibility and imagination,” Levi tells Observer. “Anyone can, if they allow themselves, travel to realms that include Wonderland, to wander about—and, if the travellers are generous, to come back and translate their experiences for the rest of us.”
As we enter an age of generative A.I., algorithms and data-led decisions, human imagination and creativity must be prioritized, as it is in Wonderland. With no fixed meaning, Carroll’s dream narrative continues to give artists space and liberty to draw on its surreal symbolism, coming-of-age narratives, puns and puzzles to make their own sense, or nonsense, from a story which is about stories. As long as there are artists, Alice will keep wandering through Wonderland.
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