Yellow Wallpaper (2022)

After the 1892 similarly titled short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman this series expands the novel of woman suffering from depression and anxiety, and in order to be cured is basically imprisoned by her physician husband. There she is subjected to the rest cure, ordered to move as little as possible, secluded and deprived of the intellectual exercise she craves. Out of proclaimed love the good doctor experiments on his wife, forcing on her treatments that only exacerbated her condition.

The woman of in this story, who much like Gilman is also a writer, starts to obsess about the yellow wallpaper of her bedroom, hallucinating movements of distant figures. Through which she tries to imagine an escape from her familiar prison. In a larger context the writing of Gilman resonates as a revolt again her husband who controls her so deeply, and larger still as a protest of womanhood agains 19th century patriarchal oppression.

The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as one of the great gothic horror literatures, yet also a historic account of the ways men tried to ‘cure’ female ‘weakness’ and ‘hysteria’. As well as about misunderstanding diseases of the mind.

The series of photographs explores that world of helplessness created by being confined. Made to endlessly reflect on the absurd mundaneness of the things around you, walls, doors, bedsheets, windows. Searching for an escape through hallucinations and dream walking. The series refer to the short story by Gilman, as a description of a persisting problem, as ekphrasis to the still extremely relevant discourse on subjugation and inequality between men and women.

Finally the series ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ is the precursor to another work of mine, called ‘Dancing Notes’. Which looks at hysteria, mental illness and therapeutic treatment through the first iterations of the working cure, which was an directly linked to- and an evolution of sorts of, this rest cure.