Perhaps what you see deceives you?

Is that a woman in the wall?

This series is based on the 19th century short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. In the story, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes a mother’s descent into madness. She rips the wallpaper to free a woman she believes is trapped inside the wall. In my images, the girls and women often appear tangled amidst the flowers, geometry, and toile.

I began constructing these photographs several years ago when the political landscape took a dramatic shift. I watched the paradigm of normalcy give way to disease, populism, and the subversion of truth. Covid gave me a new appreciation of interiors, both domestic and psychological. Soon, my three daughters began to leave the house. They entered a world of greater opportunity for women, yet many more constraints.

As a material wallpaper is decorative, atmospheric, and its paper thin construction belies its power to consume. Although what is in the images may feel suffocating, the techniques I used to create them was anything but. I experimented with the materiality of printmaking, and delved into museum archives, as well as my own. I perused historic patterns and illustrations. If I couldn’t leave the house at least my mind could wander.

In many of these images I try to merge the past with the present. Each collage includes a portrait I have made. Sometimes I wonder what messages and mores these young women have inherited from those who came before. What would historic women say?

At first I saw these young women in a struggle to extricate themselves from these domestic interiors, to break free from traditional narratives, and speak out about the world. But then I wondered if perhaps some sought refuge from what they witnessed, and found safety in their silence.

That is, if they are there at all.