I have been ridiculously busy and not able to post here about my Yellow Wallpaper art because although I have been making progress, I haven’t finished anything since the initial wooden spoon!
Since then I have had several revelations about where this work wanted to take me.
This is the inside of the Yellow Wallpaper bowl.
The house in the photo is a house I know closely resembles what Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes, complete with a tower like the protagonist is in for her "rest cure" throughout the story: the one lined with yellow wallpaper that comes alive.
Any curiosity about who lived in this actual house?
Three distinctive writers and some significant “lesser known” people lived here.
Louisa May Alcott and her family lived there when she was a child. The house she describes in Little Women was this very house, on the edge of Concord. People now call it “Wayside.”
It was a stop on the Underground Railroad at one point and then Nathaniel Hawthorne moved in, originally with his family. He built the tower you see, the one I dearly love as it suits our story as well. Nathaniel Hawthorne took to being a hermit several times in his life. He wrote in later life from this tower, separate yet able to see out over his countryside.
The next owner of the home was Harriet Lathrop, better known by her pseudonym, Margaret Sidney, the author of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, one of my mother’s childhood favorites among many other books and stories. It was Harriet who first chose to preserve Concord’s history, which she passed to her daughter Margaret M. Lothrop who wanted to specifically preserve Concord’s rich literary history. For thirty years of her life, Margaret opened her home and gave tours, remembering many of the other (perhaps less famous) occupants: Mary Peabody Mann, who lived there for a year and Rose Hawthorne, Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s daughter, did cutting edge work with cancer patients in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
These stories laced with the appearance of the home made it an obvious choice to represent the spooky home in The Yellow Wallpaper Art Project: the space where the narrator slowly and progressively lost her mind.
Tomorrow I will show you the bottom of the bowl which I finished just tonight – and a way you may be involved in a unique collaboration with this art project.
Thank you for visiting and oh, how I love catching up with you and enjoying your art, too!
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© 2011
Julie Jordan Scott
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