Visions from the Wallpaper

It is a 27 inch wide and 8 feet long piece of wallpaper reconstructed in homage to the novella, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 

The novella was written in 1892 and has long been considered a piece of early feminist literature written to protest the rest cure prescribed by Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. I saw this exhibition as an opportunity to honour and remember a story that reflects the impact of the controlling patriarchal system on one woman’s mental health and wellbeing. The unnamed main character in the novel has postpartum depression and her doctor husband follows a similar approach to Weir Mitchell. While on holiday in a colonial mansion, she is forced to rest and is unable to write or do anything productive or stimulating. Her husband chooses the upstairs nursery as their room with bars on the windows and a peculiar yellow wallpaper on the walls. With nothing to do, the wallpaper begins to occupy her mind as she tries to figure out the ornate pattern. Her work then evolves into freeing the women she sees behind the wallpaper pattern by tearing the paper from the walls.

27 inches wide is one of the standard widths for wallpaper. I created it as a large collage imagining while making that I am piecing together elements of the story from the wallpaper ripped from the walls. Coincidentally, the story takes place in July and this piece occupied all of my July in its making. It is constructed using collage papers made from linocut and gelatin printing techniques while referencing wallpaper patterns of the late 1800s. I also printed with plants that were growing in my garden outside my studio as a reminder of the garden outside the character's window in the story. The wallpaper patterns represent a controlled and sometimes contorted version of nature and the garden is a place of freedom.  On close examination, you can see shadowy traces of women printed from Ladies Home Journals in the early 1900s to remember the women that were trapped in the wallpaper.  For the exhibition, I chose to hang it not quite on the wall and touching the floor rather than fully adhered to acknowledge that some women are still trapped and I want them to be able to be free. 

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Photo credit left by Kelly Stevenson