“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
~ Sylvia Plath
This is my third year participating in Art Every Day Month and I am thrilled to be a part of it. This year, my excitement bubbles differently because I am beginning the month with a theme and aiming to continue building a body of work around this theme.
I have long noticed creative women: artists, writers, poets, singers, actors have a tendency toward depression. I have also noticed there are many of these women who fight depression and end with a young death due to suicide, or illness which may not have killed them if they felt better mentally. These women include Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf, among others.
Then there are the women who had depression and fought back, reclaiming their lives and living with their mental illness successfully. My favorite discovery in this category is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. Her doctor told her that in order to get well, she would need to have a life full of domestic activities. She was to “never pick up a pencil, pen or paintbrush again in your life” in order to stay mentally healthy.
Gilman gathered her daughter and her gumption and fled to California, half way across the country, and put down some writing roots in Pasadena. Her landmark work, The Yellow Wallpaper, was born soon thereafter. It is a semi-autobiographical novel of a woman’s postpartum descent into madness. Powerful, evocative and still used in academic settings, this isn’t necessarily and easy read for a woman in 2011. It is important, though, and I highly recommend it. Plus you can still download it for free or read it on free websites as it is old enough not to be copy-protected.
Here is a link to read it online via PagebyPage.com ~ it is more a novella than a novel. If you have difficulty, there are also study guides online to check out as a help.
Here is a summary from enotes.com
I recognize you may not be as fascinated by this topic as I, so you may simply look at my art and comment without the passion for women artists and depression that I have. The art will stand for itself on its own as well.
Since I have suffered from intermittent bouts of depression for my entire life, I finally realized I have more than a kindred relationship with many women from the past, present and future. Women like me, who dared to be fully themselves, even owning up to their depression ~ embracing it to create art and in many changes, changed the world as a result.
The art you see here is my first piece in the series. I submitted it for an all Women’s Art Show, Prerogative, which opens this Saturday. Its foundation is a small wooden bowl, indicative of the traditional women’s “place” in pure domesticity. It is covered with words from the books of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as some Poetry from the American Poetry Review of 1991. The centerpiece is a darling house, a curvy ~ squat house that reminded me of myself, actually. It is covered with a photo from a cemetery in Middletown, Connecticut. It isn’t just any cemetery, though, it is located within the State Hospital and contains headstones with only numbers on them. These nameless people were the mentally ill who were housed in the state hospital. Some of them women, some of them injustly. They died before the revolution in mental illness with the rise of effective medication.
I visited there last Spring and the scene has haunted me ever since. AS IT SHOULD. This art gives voice and honor to women who have died with their poems unwritten, their songs unsung and their stories untold. This is one way I feel like I am giving them voice. There are so many great women artists who are NOT among the famous, it just feels right to honor them with my art for this month.
I look forward to “meeting” the others of you from Art Every Day Month.
Follow me on Twitter: @JulieJordanScot
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
© 2011
Julie Jordan Scott
Recent Comments