the yellow wallpaper
the yellow wallpaper is an installation of over 200 clay tiles of various floral shapes in yellow tones, hung to resemble wallpaper. These tiles were formed in the same process as the sugar cookies of my childhood. Both dough and clay rolled by hand, cut with stainless steel cutters of various shapes and sizes. My studio space is most often my kitchen, so clay and cookies inhabit the same space, the identities of artist-mother working in parallel, in tandem. Rooting my work quite firmly in the sphere of domesticity, I am operating both in connection with and seeking to disrupt and challenge the assumptions we continue to make about this space and those who occupy it. the yellow wallpaper is based on a short story, of the same name, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. Gilman describes the uncanny experience of a woman suffering from an undisclosed illness, which reading it now, can be understood as a postpartum mental health crisis. The character’s description of her experience is disturbingly relatable to contemporary experiences of motherhood – her isolation, her anger, how easily her experience is misunderstood and dismissed by those around her. How much has stayed the same in 134 years?
In the yellow wallpaper, I seek to remind viewers of sweet and homey things: cookies, wallpaper, flowers. And at the same time refer to something a bit more disquieting - the cookies look slightly burnt and too plentiful to be quite right. If this is wallpaper, it’s too heavy, the pattern uneven and discoloured. Through the use of repetition in this piece, I aim to make visible the felt sense of rumination and anxiety; to make tactile the ongoing and ever-present constraints felt while tirelessly pursuing the image of perfection in motherhood, the relentless pressure to present a mask of happiness when what is being felt is something quite different. I invite the viewer into this experience with me, into a space that presents a dialectic, an image and a narrative that is never just one thing.