Charlie McCabe’s obsession with film was evident early on, but what was more obvious from an early age was her love of writing. To put it into perspective, her dreams of becoming a novelist were shattered at the age of 12 by a teacher who told her that she couldn’t write. Even in the wake of heartbreak, she did not manage to stray very far off that path, quickly deciding she would go into comic books as a career – or costume design, she couldn’t decide. It didn’t matter – it showed an interest in visual storytelling before she was even out of primary school.
It took until the age of 15 before she realised what she actually wanted to do with her life and a little while longer to learn that the word for what she wanted to be is “auteur.” She went on to study film, although she didn’t wait until she was old enough for university to start learning purely in order to satiate a burning curiosity.
With no guidance for her personal inquisition into the possibilities of cinema, she decided to start at the beginning. This step-by-step approach worked for a time, studying cinema chronologically, like a history book… but then she fell down a rabbit hole.
It is still unclear which White Rabbit led her there – it may have been a long-standing love of modernist art which led her to Dali’s collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Dadaist works like Dreams That Money Can Buy, or it may have been an accidental discovery of Donald Cammell & Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, or even the use of Tarantino’s films as a kind of cinematic thesaurus, but whatever the source, she has yet to find her way out of Wonderland.
On her adventures, she developed a deep love for oddities – defiance of traditional narrative forms, anti-heroes, extraordinary visuals, unintelligible hilarity and beauty within the grotesque. And armed with knowledge of the arsenal of the undeniably great and unfairly unsung, her personal artistic voice was allowed to emerge (although undoubtedly inclined to change over time) as she realised where her narrative interests lay: universal humanity presented at extremes, Solipsism and Subjectivism, and the aesthetics of memories.
As an artist, however, her ambition is to create work which is bold enough to speak for itself – she doesn’t want to be Alice; but rather, a White Rabbit for anyone who happens to glance in her direction.
