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In 2005-06 I took a year out of my “everyday” life to pursue a
Master’s degree in Visual Culture at Northumbria
University in Newcastle, England
studying in particular the visual culture of the nineteenth century which had
become the bedrock of my visual work. I used Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper [1]as
an organizing principle when writing my thesis to tie together my various
interests in feminst space, Victorian design reform and the failed grand
domestic revolution[2]
and has also become the visual launching point for my new studio work.
Published in 1892, this gothic short story traces the descent
of a dutiful doctor’s wife into insanity using the wallpaper’s design as a
vehicle for her madness. When I was studying Victorian design reform at Northumbria I
began to see a parallel in the language directed towards both mad women and
immoral wallpaper which helped me understand what had seemed such an odd
metaphor, wallpaper for madness. I began to speculate on a twentieth century
feminist/spatial interpretation of The
Yellow Wallpaper as more than a metaphor for madness.
It is relevant that it is such badly designed wallpaper, which embraces all that is grotesque and frivolous; things modernity has rejected as feminine. I began to think that maybe the women wasn’t trapped in the wallpaper but rather evading the design censors, lurking half hidden in the riotous wallpaper embracing the chaos rejected by the (male) design reformers at the end of the Victorian period, taking refuge in this feminine space that refutes all the parameters of a masculine modernity. The wallpaper in the story is hanging in the nursery (an almost exclusively female space, except for male children it was rarely visited by men), a domestic space defined by women’s roles in interior spaces, by the cult of True Womanhood and the virtues of docility and maternity. It is also a space where at least some control might be exerted over the domain precisely because of these definitions of femininity and the gender exclusivity of maternity. The wallpaper reads in this nursery space as pregnant, giving birth, delivering at the end of the story the woman who refuses to go back into the patriarchal space. The narrator is taken back to the nursery to be reconditioned but instead she finds in the wallpaper an ally and an escape.
The wallpaper itself could be considered a marginal space, like Bachelard’s skin, [3 ]a boundary between inside and outside, a possible space for negotiation where wallpaper becomes both public and private, a place for defining these disparate places, for investigating the domestic as tactical. For me the pattern has come to be about a psychological space, a mythical space of freedom, the space hidden within the wallpaper, behind the pattern, only visible now because of twentieth century analysis of space by writers like Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray.
This is the space that I am exploring now… I am working on large scale installation, parts of which have already been shown, that consists of wallpaper panels, where the pattern is variously occupied, and the gallery space which has been infiltrated by the pattern, occupying everything it touches. Together these two elements transform the space into a disturbingly flowered environment that allows for a fanciful suspension of the everyday to create a space for dreaming up a new utopian vision of space for a new generation today.
[1] Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper
[2] Dolores, The Grand Domestic Revolution
[3] Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space
It is relevant that it is such badly designed wallpaper, which embraces all that is grotesque and frivolous; things modernity has rejected as feminine. I began to think that maybe the women wasn’t trapped in the wallpaper but rather evading the design censors, lurking half hidden in the riotous wallpaper embracing the chaos rejected by the (male) design reformers at the end of the Victorian period, taking refuge in this feminine space that refutes all the parameters of a masculine modernity. The wallpaper in the story is hanging in the nursery (an almost exclusively female space, except for male children it was rarely visited by men), a domestic space defined by women’s roles in interior spaces, by the cult of True Womanhood and the virtues of docility and maternity. It is also a space where at least some control might be exerted over the domain precisely because of these definitions of femininity and the gender exclusivity of maternity. The wallpaper reads in this nursery space as pregnant, giving birth, delivering at the end of the story the woman who refuses to go back into the patriarchal space. The narrator is taken back to the nursery to be reconditioned but instead she finds in the wallpaper an ally and an escape.
The wallpaper itself could be considered a marginal space, like Bachelard’s skin, [3 ]a boundary between inside and outside, a possible space for negotiation where wallpaper becomes both public and private, a place for defining these disparate places, for investigating the domestic as tactical. For me the pattern has come to be about a psychological space, a mythical space of freedom, the space hidden within the wallpaper, behind the pattern, only visible now because of twentieth century analysis of space by writers like Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray.
This is the space that I am exploring now… I am working on large scale installation, parts of which have already been shown, that consists of wallpaper panels, where the pattern is variously occupied, and the gallery space which has been infiltrated by the pattern, occupying everything it touches. Together these two elements transform the space into a disturbingly flowered environment that allows for a fanciful suspension of the everyday to create a space for dreaming up a new utopian vision of space for a new generation today.
[1] Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper
[2] Dolores, The Grand Domestic Revolution
[3] Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space