Not long ago, no serious artist would have dared to place her art in any sort of relation, symbolic or otherwise, to wallpaper. The decorative was anathema to artists and theoreticians who wanted art purged of ornamentation, untainted by the quotidian and by story telling. It just goes to show how quickly things can change. Women artists, in particular, have revolutionized the realm of the decorative in recent decades: reclaiming pattern as a formal device; validating handiwork such as knitting, quilting, needle pointing as legitimate means for high art expression; proclaiming that beauty is not necessarily a bad word. Narrative, too, has returned to fashion, cleverly de-constructed with torn fabrics, off-key colours and French philosophical accessories.
Out of this pluralistic and permissive cultural context comes Michèle White's ambitious new work Yellow Wallpaper. Borrowing her title from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 proto-feminist novella about a woman's descent into madness, the artist has created a psychologically charged environment in which the domestic and the disastrous are finely interlaced.
The art work Yellow Wallpaper -- a complex series of encaustic panels arranged on four walls to evoke a room -- is in no way a literal illustration of the text. Rather, the visual artist communes with the writer across a century as with a sympathetic ancestor, affirming continuity of concern and purpose. What unites the two is the courageous charting of a voyage through the maelstrom, a determination to wrest from disintegration and madness something other than shipwreck. Each bears witness to a private horror that is probably no easier to face and no better understood now than it was a hundred years ago. Each articulates a particularly female perspective within a male-dominated culture.
In Gilman's tale, the narrator has suffered a mental breakdown, possibly a post-partum depression. She has been confined to bed rest, a punitive 19th-century 'cure' based on the theory that women's minds were too fragile to handle much in the way of stimulation. Cut off from the world, the patient fixates on the only object of visual interest in her barren room: the yellow wallpaper whose very colour becomes an object of fear and disgust. All that has been repressed in her psyche surfaces as threatening imagery in the wallpaper; she struggles against increasingly malevolent forces that eventually pull her under.
Central to both the story and the art installation is the idea of the wall as a screen onto which the unconscious mind projects its fears and desires. In the 19th century work, written before the widespread acceptance of psychoanalysis and before female sexuality could be openly discussed or acknowledged, the unconscious manifests itself through symbols. Today, White demonstrates the ongoing potential of iconography to mirror the shifting world of the unconscious and its dark, fertile abundance.
Exploiting the fluid, tactile properties of encaustic, the artist builds her works layer by layer, so that time and process are part of the work. Small symbolic objects embedded in the wax appear to swim about in a primordial soup; surfaces are scratched away in a process reminiscent of the captive narrator's frantic tearing at the wallpaper in her room. A glowing, astringent shade of yellow is the common ground that unites the disparate panels. The colour rides an edge between the repellent and the alluring, as do fin-de-siècle curlicues, bar-like stripes and dappled passages suggestive of the claustrophobic domestic interiors painted a century ago by Vuillard and Bonnard.
Stifling rooms in which women sit and sit -- waiting, one might assume, to go mad. Yet Gilman's narrator must have survived or how else could she have told the tale? The same is true for her contemporary counterpart who enthrals the spectator with a journey no less absorbing and fantastic. Art becomes both a testimony to endurance and a victory -- of sorts -- over darkness.