This is a collection of embroidered mono-prints inspired directly by the book, The Yellow Wall Paper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1892. The original story is written from the perspective of a post-partum mother recently removed to a house in the countryside by her (doctor) husband. As an adult woman she is treated like a child, told to rest as a way of dealing with her depression and anxiety. In the room that she stays in is this dreadful patterned yellow wall paper. The quotes are selected directly from the text as a poetic representation of her perceived descent into madness, which can be seen as her own release and experience of freedom from this domestic prison.
Layers of pigment are built up on a gelatin printing plate and transferred onto muslin fabric, a material often used for humble means such as undergarments or as a drafting material for patterning garments of high fashion. The threads in the hand-embroidery tie us to domestic space, repetitive women's work, and the connection of the hand-to-material and is a stripped-down experience replicating the narrator's removal from high society and class pretension to primal human and emotional experience.
The Yellow Wallpaper. Front Cover.
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpape: "It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not the beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul and yellow things."
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper. Front Cover.: "I cry at nothing and cry most of the time."
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper: "'What is it little girl?' he said, 'Don't walk about like that you'll get cold.'"
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper: "The faint figure seemed to shake the pattern just as if she wanted to get out."
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper: "I've got out at last."
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper.
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, 2014-16
The Yellow Wallpaper. Back Cover.
Monoprint and embroidery on muslin, damask fabric swatch, 2014-16
