The question that folklore has always asked is not what these creatures are but where they come from, and the honest answer is that they come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. The fey are not the exclusive property of any single tradition. They surface across cultures in different forms, under different names, carrying the same essential quality: they occupy the threshold between the ordinary world and whatever lies beyond it, and they do not resolve neatly into either.

Fairyland arrived in Osaka one week after the Tokyo showing closed, and the city it arrived into was already different from the one it would normally have found. The COVID outbreak had deepened in the intervening days, and Osaka, which had been Cooley's home for the better part of three decades, was quieter than he had ever known it outside of those particular hours after midnight that he had always sought out and loved. Then, the emptiness of the city had been a pleasure, the streets belonging to something other than ordinary life, the familiar made strange by darkness and silence. Now that quality had extended itself into the days, uninvited and unresolved, and the paintings on the walls of Artglorieux Gallery of Osaka depicted a world that had always known how to exist in exactly that condition.

Artglorieux Gallery of Osaka was at the time the largest gallery in the city, and the exhibition used that space fully. Seventy works ranging from intimate panel works to larger canvases spread across multiple rooms, the atmosphere building gradually as visitors moved through the space, each room opening onto another with the unhurried logic of the world the works themselves proposed. The Briar Fairy, the Tree Sprites, the Sleeping Fairy and the Fairy Larva existed alongside the Thunderbird and the Dryad, figures from traditions separated by geography and history but united by the same fundamental character. The layered acrylic surfaces reward sustained looking, forms resolving and softening as distance and attention shift, the beings inhabiting their panels with the quality of things that have always been there and are only now becoming visible.

Moving through those rooms in March 2020, through a gallery in a city that had itself become a kind of threshold, was to inhabit the space between the world the paintings described and the world outside that had quietly begun to resemble it. The fey have always lived in that space. In Osaka that week, so did everyone else.