Yellow Wallpaper (2022)

Yellow Wallpaper emerges from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's haunting 1892 short story, expanding its exploration of a woman's descent into madness as both psychological thriller and searing indictment of medical authority. The original narrative follows a woman suffering from what we might now recognize as postpartum depression, who finds herself essentially imprisoned by her physician husband under the guise of treatment. Prescribed the infamous "rest cure," she is ordered to move as little as possible, isolated from intellectual stimulation, and deprived of the writing that might offer her solace and expression.

What unfolds is a chilling portrait of how proclaimed love can become a form of experimentation, as the well-intentioned doctor subjects his wife to treatments that only deepen her psychological distress. Confined to her bedroom, the unnamed woman becomes increasingly fixated on the room's yellow wallpaper, its strange patterns beginning to shift and move in her peripheral vision. Through these hallucinations, she attempts to imagine an escape from what has become a familiar prison, the wallpaper itself transforming into both symptom and symbol of her entrapment.

Gilman's story operates on multiple levels of meaning, functioning simultaneously as gothic horror literature and historical document of 19th-century medical practices. The narrative serves as the author's own revolt against the rest cure she had personally endured, prescribed by the real Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, whose treatment nearly drove her to complete mental collapse. On a broader scale, the story stands as a fierce protest against the patriarchal systems that pathologized women's intellectual and creative desires, diagnosing them as symptoms of "hysteria" or feminine "weakness."

This photographic series enters into dialogue with Gilman's work, exploring the psychological landscape of confinement and the way enforced inactivity can transform the most mundane objects into sources of obsession. The images investigate how walls, doors, bedsheets, and windows become charged with meaning when they constitute the entire universe of someone's daily existence. Through the camera's eye, these ordinary domestic elements reveal their potential for both imprisonment and transcendence, mirroring the protagonist's search for escape through hallucination and what might be called "dream walking."

The photographs capture the suffocating intimacy of spaces that should offer comfort but instead become sites of psychological deterioration. Each frame examines how the enforced contemplation of domestic banality can become a form of torture, while simultaneously revealing the human capacity to find meaning and even beauty in the most constrained circumstances. The series asks what happens when the familiar becomes strange, when the protective becomes punitive, when healing becomes harm.

Working as both homage to Gilman's literary achievement and contemporary commentary, Yellow Wallpaper serves as ekphrasis to an enduring discourse about power, gender, and medical authority. The visual narrative acknowledges that while medical understanding has evolved dramatically since the 1890s, questions about who has the authority to define illness, prescribe treatment, and determine recovery remain painfully relevant. The subjugation and inequality between men and women that Gilman exposed persists in new forms, making her story not merely historical artifact but ongoing warning.

The project also functions as a bridge to broader questions about mental health treatment and the evolution of therapeutic approaches. Yellow Wallpaper reveals itself as the precursor to Dancing Notes, another body of work that examines how medical understanding of "hysteria" and mental illness evolved from the destructive rest cure toward more progressive treatments. The "working cure" that emerged in the early 20th century represented a direct response to and evolution from the rest cure's failures, recognizing that healing might require engagement rather than isolation, activity rather than enforced passivity.

Through this photographic exploration, the series positions itself within a continuum of artistic and medical responses to psychological suffering, tracing how society's approach to mental distress has shifted from suppression to expression, from isolation to connection, from rest to movement. The work ultimately suggests that art itself can serve as a form of working cure, offering both creator and viewer a means of processing experiences that might otherwise remain trapped within the confines of silence and solitude.

Yellow Wallpaper stands as both artistic meditation and historical investigation, using the language of photography to illuminate the complex relationships between confinement and creativity, between medical authority and personal agency, between the pathologizing of women's experiences and their ultimate transcendence through artistic expression.