A whole spectrum of colours new to the eye’: Gender Metamorphoses and Identity Frescoes in 'Girl Meets Boy' and 'How to Be Both' by Ali Smith

In "Girl Meets Boy" (2007) and "How to Be Both" (2014) Ali Smith observes and explores gender mutability and identity metamorphoses. Whether she is re-writing Ovid’s myth of Iphis – a girl raised as a boy falls in love for a girl ("Girl Meets Boy") – or telling the two parallel yet convergent stories of a Reinassance fresco painter who was born a girl and of a XX-century girl mistaken for a boy ("How to Be Both"), Ali Smith seems to employ the fresco technique, in which water, pigment and plaster merge together into an allegorical picture: she investigates the fluidity of gender identity by intermingling time and timelessness, literal and symbolic meanings, fiction and reality, art and life, and male and female. In Smith’s composite narrative frescos different binary oppositions, including gender identity, coexist, clash, and ceasessly stand for something else, reaviling new patterns underneath and, ultimately, the everchanging metamorphoses of gender identity – “a whole spectrum of colours new to the eye” (2007).