Windless Danced the Forest is an ivy-threaded fairy path of peculiar poems, short stories, and magical musings through the vast imagination of Leila ElManfaa.

Carried along on the colors of Pre-Raphaelite inspired oil paintings, conté sketches, graphite drawings, and digital prints, Leila writes original tales from a different time, from a twilit realm full of starry shadows and ancient secrets. Windless Danced the Forest is the artist’s alightment from modernity, and an invitation to indulge in the whims of the imagination. 

 

Twenty-one and blown to Bristol by my love of art and adventure, I tell original dark fairytales and paint them to life! I grew up in Philadelphia, a crucible of concrete and capitalism, and the cradle of my desire to go galavanting off to faraway lands. But my mother made sure that I never stopped wondering, and filled my childhood with fantasy and fairytales. My romance with Baroque mystery and the Pre-Raphaelites came when I started high school. I fell in love with the math, magic, and whimsy of it all. I fell in love with the study of art, and how each element learned was a means to share in living color the vast worlds hiding in my imagination since childhood. 

To break an impossible cycle, one must do something ridiculous. So when I was nineteen, I decided to don my passion for art as a pair of wings that would carry me away from Philadelphia forever, and into a new story of my own design!

Details:

When?

4th - 26th February 

Mon-Fri: 9am-9pm

Sat: 11am-5pm

Where?

The Station, Silver Street, Bristol, BS1 2AG

FREE

Open to all ages!
 



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