Jane Hughes 

‘Immaculate Conception’ - Documenting Sabrina and the making of the perfect a. Sabrina's Story b. Work in Progress - Home Studio. I missed the 31st of May deadline to submit my proposal for the MA summer show due to ill health and I was quite lost at this point. I decided to go to both the Foundling Museum and the Museum of the Home because I had been circling the issue of children living without agency and the home, as both a place and feeling, in my previous Units. They were subjects I wanted to explore more, but I knew I needed to step away from my family photographs and the rich vein of my childhood as it was too painful. Having gone to the Foundling Museum on the 3rd of June, I began researching Sabrina Sidney’s life. Well, as much as I could, for she was largely missing - her presence was only visible in other people’s stories and archives. I went back through my diaries from when I was 12 to try and reconnect with that version of me and to connect with Sabrina. But to have been so indoctrinated as to believe your worth wholly depended on serving others. Sabrina was the victim of one man’s obscene experiment - she had essentially become a mere idea for him rather than a person, to be programmed for his pleasure. In the mix, I had to also try to understand her within the context of the period she lived and the expectations of gender roles in the period. There was no doubt Thomas acted illegally, but he felt entitled enough to take the risk and was able to coerce his friends to help him abduct the two girls. How could I imagine having a gun directly fired at you while being told not to make a sound, to be forced to submerge in cold water up to your chin when you cannot swim, to be made to lie in your wet clothes in a field until they were dry, to have pins and hot wax put on your skin and to be still asked not to make a sound - it is horrendous and unfathomable. I wanted to express through my paintings what Sabrina had been put through in these horrifying ordeals, but not in an obvious or explicit way. I wanted them to reveal themselves subtly. What she had suffered was kept private, a secret, and she could not protest. Protest meant banishment. I needed the paintings to reflect this experience. We moved into the Wilson Road studios, and I was given a great space in a room with Brianna, Astrid, Stevie-Ray and Maggie. Unfortunately, my family circumstances made it too difficult to spend extended periods away from home, so I was back to painting in the room at the top of our house, as I had done before. I hadn't decided what surface to paint on, but I got on a train to Jackson’s in Dalston and bought myself 12 small Gesso Boards. They were all small in scale, 25.4 x 25.4, with one measuring. I liked their solidness, and yet, at first, painting with my oils felt like painting with a felt pen on a shiny surface - I was scared it would just wipe off. I began to get the feel for it and the pleasure of it. I did not want texture; I wanted it to be smooth. The palette reflected a sense of the colours of the period, but I also wanted them to juxtapose with the harsh subject matter. I needed the audience to be drawn into the paintings, to be curious about why there were these cropped images of a young person, was this the same person, and what was the narrative - to become a voyeur. I used pictures I had taken whilst visiting Tate Britain, the National Gallery and the Museum of the Home as my primary source material to get a feel for costumes, furniture and the ideas of people living in England at this period. But I also created whole albums of pictures from the internet and occasionally used my family as models for hands, necks, etc. They were less helpful for this venture as their physiques were male and too old. I painted on the floor as I have done previously, finding it impossible to paint staring at the wall. I used no mediums to mix my oils, just Gamsol, to make them more transparent and fluid. As I seem to do, I used a lot of white. Some of the paintings were unsuccessful, and these were the ones which fixated me. Despite painting it repeatedly, Sabrina wading into the water just looked like some ‘chocolate box’ whimsy. I got too attached to the turquoise green of the water and so was trapped by it. The fireplace, too, just looked to me like a child’s picture of some naive Christmas scene, not the traumatic scene it was. To her great delight, Sabrina had been presented with a trunk of beautiful clothes, but then Thomas made her burn every one of the garments. Perhaps I tried too hard to try and capture all these terrible moments, and in the end, the eight that were shown worked far better together than had I put all eleven in. At this time, I was still very taken up with the idea of connecting the paintings with a token. The sort of token mothers left for their babies in the hope that they would be reunited one day, and I said as much in my email to Geraint on the 20th of June. Although I was beginning to think this might not work and thought I needed an alternative, as a backup. I already had a large canvas (120 x 120) and having always been fascinated by ‘Lover's Eyes’, I decided to create a scaled-up painting to juxtapose with my smaller collection. For this painting, I used acrylics, and I painted it over a two-day period, which is so unusual for me; to do it so quickly is unheard of. I loved it. I loved it was askew, and I loved the feeling that I didn't know if Sabrina was looking at us or if we were spying on her. The scale was large but not significant in the grand sense like Lucretia’s or Maggie’s, but it felt it had its presence, and where the smaller paintings focussed on body parts, none of the parts were as small as the eye, and this was the focus of the biggest painting. She would see us and we her. I couldn’t quite give up the idea of creating something beyond the painting and I thought the perfect wife would need a wedding bouquet. I created this by cutting up dolls and using the same areas of the body I had used in my paintings, but now sewn and bound into fabric as individual flowers in the bouquet I enjoyed making these - It was a relief from the hours of painting I had done over the previous three weeks, but it wasn’t successful and looked sadly craft like. I think if I had perhaps given myself more time it could have worked. c. Sabrina - making of a Perfect Wife Eyes Sabrina’s eyes were very important to me. I wanted her not to stare at us in abject terror, but to show she was fearful and perplexed. Rousseau’s views on female education was a significant influence on Thomas Day. He believed girls should be educated, but these should not be of an intellectual nature but practical lessons. She was to be trained to be a housewife and a mother, to please her husband, to enjoy only the simple things in life and to uphold a strict moral code. Mouth The mouth of women in classic 17th and 18th century paintings seemed to always be pouting, but with a childlike innocence. An ideal beauty was to have ‘prettily curled hair and two lips pouting of the coral hue’. Sabrina’s mouth is slightly open, her intentions open to interpretation. 17th and 18th Century portraits of young women cropped. Torso Static and under instruction, Sabrina stands slightly above us - her backdrop a cold statue of a male figurehead. She is little more than a child and her dress is burned due to the gunshots aimed directly at her. For this painting, I was influenced by paintings such as ‘Portrait of Helen Sears’ by Abbott Handerson Thayer and John Singer Sargent. Foot I feel this painting is a success. I felt I captured the movement of the weighty skirt, her body and the shadows on the ground. The sense of her walking away, and barefoot - I wanted the viewer to ask why. It has a cinematic quality to it. The colours are muted, plummy and rich. Hand Nick’s hand merged with the colour of the bedcover in the photograph I took. I used this to capture Sabrina's transience and ephemerality in my decision-making on how to paint her hand. I made it almost monochromatic. I didn’t want to show the pins piercing her skin, but rather to imply something, to create a level of uncertainty. She is holding the pin between her fingers. Fingers Thomas Day forced Sabrina to take regular cold baths and submerge herself in the lake in front of his house. I was interested in the bathroom of the period which was a copper or wooden cabinets placed in the centre of a room and then draped in linens and materials, before being filled. In my painting, there is just a trace of her fingers reaching for the sides. The colours are muted, watery and pale. Body The prostrate figure, the fallen woman are all classical painting tropes. Sabrina lies sprawled, exposed, vulnerable and defeated in an empty landscape. Her mother a ‘fallen’ woman, Sabrina would need to be meek and obedient or find herself abandoned and without support. The horizon is unpainted and I used only white, traces of pink and green to give the impression of her body almost hovering, ghostlike above the land. Back This is the back of her and what it means to be a figure observed, but unseen. Perhaps a less successful painting as the wax on Sabrina’s shoulder is crude and unsubtle. Lover’s eye Georgian society was fascinated with ‘seeing and being seen’, and as it was a period of limited social interaction between the sexes, the intimate gift of a ‘lover’s eye’ was precious. They are mesmerising and unsettling and resist categorisation. It resembles a peephole staring out at us. They were designed to be miniature, and the eye was meant only to be seen by the recipient. I chose to scale up the painting; it is no longer an intimate miniature but a demanding, unsettling, ambiguous picture of a young person’s eye gazing directly at us, holding us in her grip. d. A good few mistakes My whimsy collection. I spent disproportionate amounts of time on these paintings, particularly the woman in the water and the girl at the window. I think I realised the fire was a lost cause early on. I would agonise over the other two, repainting the head in the window, wiping it off - looking for other images of bonnets or women’s necks - they just looked stilted and emotionless. So many versions - all looking the same. 2. Documenting ‘ No Man’s Land' - the imperfect wife Virginia Sylvia Patricia Mileva Elsa Catherine Una Those imperfect wives The Applicant First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit—— Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it’s a poultice. You have an eye, it’s an image. My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. 'Longed for him. Got him. Shit.' Margaret Attwood Having received constructive feedback in my critique after the MA show, I wanted to push forward and develop my thoughts about women and children obscured from history, making use of the methods I had begun experimenting with in my Immaculate Conception series – thinking about filmic shots, particularly the use of the cropped image, to continue to lose my reliance on image as source and to play with scale and tones in my painting. In my critical reflection, I have explored artists and ideas that use the interplay between the written word and image. This is an area I want to experiment with as I develop this series of paintings, alongside incorporating sound and film. During the summer, my family and I had to move, and for many weeks, I did not have anywhere to paint, let alone any paints to paint with, but once I was back in college and in a property, I could create a space for myself. I was concerned that all I had had time for was reading during the summer, so now I wanted to maximise my time painting and I felt I had about four weeks left before I would need to divert my attention to this platform and the Research Festival. As we were renting, my usual cavalier approach to the top room had to stop, and I now completely sealed off the carpet and walls with tarpaulin and plastic sheeting – straight out of American Psycho. After being so involved with Sabrina, I was impatient to investigate the imbroglio of child brides. For though Sabrina never married Thomas, his intentions were to mould her into his perfect bride, and so it felt like a good place to start my research. I began looking at the global statistics for child marriages. Up until 1929, 12 years old was still the legal standard for girls marrying in Britain, and today, with parental power being privileged, young women are still being coerced into marriages against their will in the UK. Right now, globally, 650 million girls are married off while they are still children, and in 9 States in the US, there is no minimum age for marriage, oh but only if you are female. Between 2000 and 2018, 300,000 girls, some as young as 10, were married in the US, in most cases to adult men. I could go on and on - it is just horrifying to read. (Lennon, R 2023, p 22-24) I had been reading about Virginia Poe, who was only 13 when she married Edgar Alan Poe. Still, this reading then led to further reading and I began to think more about marriage as an institution, and how it enshrines and defines the identity and inequalities of the sexes into law. This also chimed with the research I had carried out in Unit 2 – exploring the limited life choices of working-class wives in the post-war period, seen through the lens of my family history. After looking at Virginia’s life and her marriage I became aware there was no shortage of other male literary giants who had exploited, abused or ignored their wives - but then why stop here? I began to look at scientists, actors, artists, politicians, men who married…. As Carmela Cuiraru spells out in her book ‘Lives of the Wives: ‘The history of wives is one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonised, marginalised, misrepresented and silenced’ and ‘history is to fame as wife is to footnote, their archival information stored under their husband's collection’. (Cuiraru, C 2023, p6). I read Ann Oakley’s book ‘forgotten wives - How Women Get Written Out of History’ to get a sense of the peculiar state of being a wife and its impact on lives. She argued persuasively that ‘wifehood’ is a necessary way of understanding women's social representation in history, which is dominated by the stories of men’s achievements in public life. To become a wife was historically to become subsumed by the man, to have in effect no identity or rights of your own or as described in an English 1632 judicial text, ‘When a small brooke or little river incorporath with the Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name…as it were clouded and overshadowed she hath lost her stream’ - wives just became a degraded specialisation of the sexes, made invisible and absent from the archival records. I wanted to take all the women I read about and revisit and reposition their place in history so their stories would become visible and would no longer be silent. To pay tribute to their achievements, honour their stoicism and sacrifices and celebrate who they were. It was and continues to be a work in progress. I wanted walls of women, a shrine almost. Work in Progress home studio It gives me pleasure to paint on Gesso boards and as my time was limited I chose to use them again. However for this series I was attracted to the smaller sizes the 15.25 cm squares. I only had a couple at home and so dashed out to try and buy up what I could. They were unavailable, so I had to do a quick online order. Again because of the time limitations for painting this body of work, (which had now become colossal, in the grandest sense, in my mind), I decided to opt for acrylics. I feel more confident with them as a paint medium, even though I prefer what I can achieve with oils. It was quite a different experience painting onto the gesso surface with the acrylics as the paint was almost instantly absorbed and dried astonishingly quickly. It encouraged me to work quickly and to use layers. I started off with the small painting of Virginia. Only one small historical painting exists of her and this was painted just hours after her death. I created her, thinking of her youth and the descriptions I read about her. She was said to have dark, almost black hair and eyes - she was only 24 when she died of consumption. It was this wasting away both metaphorically and physically that I wished to capture. She wears his heart as an earring. In my room at home, she is the one who disappears and gets lost on the shelf surrounded by the other wives, the colours I used are more muted, pale and translucent. I then painted Una and Catherine. I deviated from the small gesso boards as my order had gone astray and I just needed to paint. I feel these two were my least successful paintings. They both went through numerous guises. When Una met Radycliffe she adopted a conservatively gendered wife role within their relationship, wearing what was considered feminine attire. However, after Radycliffe died Una took to wearing her lover's clothes, tweeds, male jackets and hats. It is in this period that I painted her - the colours I used reflect this, more russet, oranges and browns. She always wore her monocle throughout their relationship. My interpretation of Catherine is from before she began producing endless babies. The attire, the colours I selected and her hair are a reflection of the period in which she lived. She is reading , and having time for herself. I felt that the smaller framed portraits had more impact than these larger paintings, but I am very attached to Una and Catherine nonetheless, particularly Catherine whose life and body was stolen from her, controlled by pregnancy and childbirth. I received my box of small gesso boards and so returned to painting at the smaller scale. Mileva and Elsa were very different personalities to each other, but both were wives of Albert Einstein. Mileva was a highly educated, pioneering physicist whose own ambitious were thwarted by a social and economic system which could not and would not recognise her. Married to Einstein she may or may not have contributed to some his greatest theories - there are too many papers working so hard to prove she didn’t -but she was his bedrock which allowed him the time, and she did what so many women do when faced with such limited choices, she became the domestic and the mother. I feel I did her justice, her strength and her intelligence gaze out at us. Elsa is more pitiful, she was used by Einstein as his administrator and organiser while he continued to have numerous relationships with other women, safe in the knowledge that she would remain dutiful and loyal. As she lay dying and in great pain he was not available to her. Elsa look is of a stoic. I have made her eyes less intense, and her complexion is more florid than Mileva’s. Patricia and Sylvia as choices are different to the other women in this collective in that each were and are recognised in their own right, and both of them were married to ‘famous men’. . This was not easy and came at a high price. Patricia was terrorised by Roald Dahl. He felt diminished by her success and so she was forbidden from flaunting it. She was also expected to perform the functions of a ‘wife’ as he saw it, ie look after their four children, cook and clean. As her career began to wane she was to discover he was in love with someone else and he abandoned their marriage. I painted her caught in the camera lights, part tearful, part terrified. I wanted Sylvia to be included in this collection because she was left with two small children on her own, abandoned, there is suggestions she was physically abused by Ted Hughes, and yet she continued, as long as she could, to write the most powerful, compelling and wonderful poetry until it all became intolerable. I would hazard a guess that it would be hard to find a man who could tend a home, look after small children and still create extraordinary literature. Virginia Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was only 13 when she eloped and married Edgar Allen Poe in 1836. They were first cousins, and he was 27. Although it was not illegal to marry so young, it would have been disapproved of, and so Virginia lied about her age on the marriage certificate, saying she was 21. She had no education, and she was a child. After only six years of marriage, Virginia, at the age of 19, contracted consumption. She only survived a further 5 years. Mayne Reid, her friend, wrote of Virginia that ‘I well knew that the rose -tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of earth’. This was the signature flush of the consumptive, a disease romanticised in literature at this time with blushing and fainting heroines abounding the novels of the time. Much is made of Poe’s grief at the loss of his young wife, and so many sources are zealously keen to point out that their relationship was platonic, although this cannot be determined. Poe was not disinterested in the female as he was involved in sexual scandals during his short marriage, and on her deathbed, Virginia claimed that one of these ‘other women’ had murdered her. He was, however, fixated on beauty being conjoined with death, having experienced the death of all the significant women in his life and Peter Coviello’s in his piece on ‘Poe in Love’ argues that Poe makes the association between the adult women suffering and death in his work and therefore ‘loving a child was for him the only functional logic’. (Coviello, P 2003) Sylvia Sylvia Plath was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet and so why include her? - Because she had wanted equality in her marriage to Ted Hughes, but instead was left feeling suffocated by domesticity and a failure, because she had to even contemplate choosing between her writing and marriage, because of the evidence Ted Hughes was emotionally and potentially physically abusive in their marriage and because he abandoned her. ‘Make him happy: cook, play, read… Never accuse, or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force’ (Plath 1956) Patricia Patricia Neal was a successful actress married to Roald Dahl considered a ruthless, emotionally detached bully and a serial womaniser who nevertheless had the highest expectations on how his wife should meet his needs. Their mutual friend Charles Marsh advised Patricia early on in their marriage that because of her fame she was emasculating Roald and that she should ‘do all the cooking, wash the dishes and do everything in the house’ if she wanted to preserve her marriage. While Roald said of her that he had ‘thought it would be difficult to train her …you know in England a family is lost if a woman is allowed to take charge. While still in her 30’s she suffered a catastrophic series of strokes, this came soon after losing her eldest child to measles. Her career was shattered and her independence lost Roald now had complete control of her and he was determined from preventing her from becoming ‘an enormous pink cabbage’ - he was variously described by her friends as her dog trainer, drill sergeant or traffic policeman, but she did recover under his humiliating regime. By this stage he was a highly successful and a respected author, and he had also begun an affair with Felicity Crosland. This affair went on for 11 years before he finally left Patricia. Later Felicity was asked whether she had had any regrets in breaking up their marriage (he of course was innocent): ‘it was a particularly difficult situation because Pat had a stroke and was not well. I don’t know how he managed to bring up these children, run a house, do the school runs and write this major volume of work. he was so worn out, so needing to be looked after, which of course Pat could not do’…… (Ciuraru, 2023, p568) Patricia observed that success did not mellow Roald Dahl ‘ ‘quite the contrary, it only reinforced his conviction that although life was a two-way street, he has the right of way’ . Ciuraru, 2023, p564) Mileva Mileva was an outstanding scientist who had to fight hard to study physics and maths, subjects reserved for males. It was while studying that she met Einstein, and they became inseparable, collaborating on ideas and papers. They married in 1902, and Mileva, who had been thwarted in her attempt to graduate, now assumed the domestic tasks in the marriage while he, Einstein, worked six days a week. However, there is strong evidence that they were still collaborating in this period of their marriage, a time of his most significant discoveries. He is often quoted as saying: “I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems”. (Gagnon, P 2016) However, by 1912, Einstein was already having an affair with his cousin, and his marriage to Mileva was collapsing. In 1914 he sent her a letter with stipulations (above) on how they might continue - the demands were impossible . He then promised her that should he win the Nobel Prize, she could have half the money if she would grant him a divorce. He later tried to rescind on this promise and wrote to her: You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your words if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important? When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do. (Gagnon, P 2016) Mileva had abandoned her own aspirations for Einstein and marriage, and he abandoned her. Despite being a pioneering female physicist, whose individual contributions are impossible to disentangle from Einstein’s, she has been denied recognition. In 2004, her unmarked grave, number 9,357, was finally identified – another woman who had been excluded from history. Apps. G Sagas of She (2021) Mileva Marić., Sagas of She. Available at: https://sagasofshe.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/mileva-maric/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CYou%20made%20me%20laugh%20when,had%20not%20accomplished%20something%20important. (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Gagnon, P. (2016a) The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s first wife, Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/ (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Does Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric deserve credit for some of his work? (2018) The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/mileva-maric-albert-einsten-physics-science-history-women-a8396411.html (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Elsa Einstein spoke of his relationship with Elsa, his second wife, as a union of convenience. She fussed over him, organised his travel and his engagements, but throughout their marriage he openly discussed his numerous affairs with her and wrote to her simply stating ‘one should do what one enjoys, and won’t harm anyone else’. He clearly did not feel she would be harmed, but praised himself for his honesty. Walter Isaacson, the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe’ said that ‘when confronted with the emotional needs of others, Einstein tended to retreat into the objectivity of his science”. She is described as his protector and his carer, allowing him to focus on his theories. When she became terminally ill he was unavailable to her. TV, N. (no date) Genius Albert Einstein’s theory of infidelity, National Geographic TV Shows, Specials & Documentaries. Available at: https://www.natgeotv.com/za/special/genius-albert-einsteins-theory-of infidelity#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhen%20confronted%20with%20the%20emotional,have%20had%20exacted%20a%20cost. (Accessed: 07 November 2023). Catherine Catherine was an accomplished author, a talented actress and a cook despite spending 22 years of her marriage producing 10 children and having at least 2 miscarriages. Charles Dickens had married Catherine before he was successful. She epitomised as a wife, everything that he had never had as a child and longed for - intelligent, stable, good-natured and able to produce children and make a fulfilling family life for him. But so many pregnancies, the years of breastfeeding and childcare took their toll on her energy and health. Dickens had already begun to seek out other women, but when he began a serious affair with Ellen Ternan he decided to separate from Catherine,. However of paramount importance, to this most controlling of men, was a desire to protect his reputation. During their separation he worked hard to imply the problem lay with Catherine. He first tried to get her incarcerated in an asylum, but this failed. So, he allowed and encouraged ugly rumours to circulate that Catherine was an alcoholic and an ‘incompetent mother’. He forced her mother and sister to sign a document, that he had prepared, to say they did not believe the rumours of his affair, even though they knew it to be true. She became marginalised and misremembered as a figure in Dickens’ life - the epitome of a frumpy and dreary wife. This novelist, so revered for his championing of the poor and the voiceless, was able to force his wife out of his home and deny her access to her children. In speaking of her, he said: “A page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank ...it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.” (Forster, 2011 (p 136) But on his death, Catherine was able to renew her relationship with her children, had many friends, and enjoyed her life again. Lillian Nayder, in her book ‘The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth’ showed that Catherine, against all the odds did preserve a sense of her self and was not defeated. Nayder, L. (2011) The other Dickens: A life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Forster, J. (2011) The life of Charles Dickens [Preprint]. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139107877. Una In 1900 and at only the age 13 Una applied to the Royal College of Art. Remarkably she was accepted, but she would never fully realise and make use of her considerable talents. Instead she dedicated her life to her great love Radclyffe Hall. She had been married to Ernest Troubridge before she Radclyffe Hall (John) but she was stifled by the marriage. Hall was a powerful magnetic figure who considered herself to be a ‘congenital invert’ with a ‘masculine soul heaving in the female bosom’. She fully supported a patriarchal society in which women abstain from ambition of their own and be ‘a good wife’. Troubridge would be one of the best, taking the submissive role in their relationship. She wrote of her role that it was ‘ a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry’ (Ciuraru, 2023, p94) The final years of their marriage were marred by Hall’s infatuation with Euguenia Souline a Russian nurse. Despite this Una was never willing to leave Hall and stayed with her until her death in 1943. It was not until 1958 when Souline died could she finally severe that tie - she had begrudgingly continued to pay her an allowance to deter her from attempts at blackmail. She lived out her life writing a tribute to Hall, wearing her clothes and creating a shrine in her memory. Ciuraru, C. (2023) Lives of the wives. Harper Collins Publishers Inc Painting (and some film) In my feedback, Anna suggested that I write a small section on the material qualities of my painting. It’s a ridiculously hard aspect for me to decipher, let alone describe. In her book ‘In the Dream House’, Machado talks of writing under a formal constraint without the letter ‘e’. I am not for one minute trying to equate my understanding of the painting Lexicon with that of female-to-female domestic abuse, but the idea of it resonated strongly with me. A lot of my time at Camberwell and Chelsea before it, has left me feeling as if I have been promoted to Registrar, and yet I have only done the First Aid course. But here goes, I will give it a try Immaculate Conception The decisions I made in painting Immaculate Conception were dictated by the subject matter and the period in which Sabrina lived. I wanted to bring both the colour palette of the Regency period into the picture, but the range of the palette was deliberately restrained, subdued and soft to highlight how Sabrina was only ever almost there. The palette and tones contrasted with the subject matter because I was cognisant of the importance of not making her trauma obvious or explicit. I chose the Gesso Boards because I just liked them, I liked the feel of them, I liked their smoothness, and yet they were robust and good for building up layers due to their high absorbency. I used oil, but as usual, with some trepidation. They take a long time to dry on Gesso, and I attempted to do quite a few pictures over a relatively short period, but I know now from experience that I can achieve a much softer palette with oils. I used Gambon to thin the paint as I wasn't experienced using any other mediums and needed to feel I was in control of this series. How do I paint - I usually began with a faint charcoal drawing, but it was very loose. I didn't use base colour but painted directly onto the white board. My strokes are loose and gestural but also delicate and, at times, indistinct - with some of the marks being quite abstract. soft and paradoxical with the subject matter. I didn't want the trauma to be obvious or explicit but seductive to encourage the audiences curiousity. The composition is very simple for each board. There is only one focus for each of them: her eyes, mouth and other body parts. They are cropped shots of a figure, which allows the viewer to make their own assumptions. They are a series; I cannot imagine one being shown without the others. No Man’s Land and ‘Lover’s Eye.’ I have conjoined these two, perhaps a little unnecessarily. It was based on the fact they are both painted using acrylic, but of course, they are painted in quite different styles, in different palettes and on different surfaces. In ‘Lover’s Eye’, although I was scaling up the size of the painting and it was on canvas rather than board, I still tried to use colours which harmonised with the smaller series of paintings. This was also to reflect the period and my response to my research of the Georgian ‘Lover’s eye’ given as a secret token. I think subconsciously, the idea of the tokens given by the mothers who had to abandon their babies at the Foundling Hospital also influenced my choice of this larger painting. The colours and the tones I have used for ‘No Man’s Land’ are stronger and visually more there. They are unmistakably faces of women who have been squeezed into tiny spaces and are now looking directly at us and questioning us. In the portrait of Patricia in particular, I have used the technique of Chiaroscuro to capture the distress on her face. And on film I make film splicing both found and personal archives to tell stories about women, women going about their daily lives who have been ignored and eclipsed from our history. My films are political; calling history out by looking patriarchy squarely in the eye, but they celebrate women too. Sound is an important component to the films overall ambience as it alters how these images are received. I use the language of film in my paintings too. I set the Mise-en-Scene to make the invisible visible, I paint in sequences, use close up shots and use light to create the atmosphere I wish to achieve Etching Because Etching is so process-driven and because I am a person who leans towards chaos and a rejection of rules it makes huge demands on me, for Etching cannot be done without following those rules. I love the rhythm of it and trying to remember the steps. It is mindful because I have to pay attention. The mark-making is therapeutic, whilst the waiting to see what results look like can be decidedly un-therapeutic.. I realise I have been very unadventurous so far as I have been trying to see how I can translate my paintings into print, but I want to continue experimenting. This year, like the last I went to the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and I found I appreciated the work so much more having had a small taste of the skills involved .

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Gallery: Resolved Work Immaculate Conception - the Perfect Wife Eyes - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Mouth - Gesso Panel 30 x 10 cm ( 2 cm deep) Oils Torso - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Foot - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Hand - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Finger - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Back - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Body - Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5 ( 3.8 cm deep) Oils Lover’s Eye - Canvas 120 x 120 cm Acrylic 2. Gallery ‘No Man’s Land’ - Imperfect wives Virginia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Sylvia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Patricia - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Mileva- Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Elsa - Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Catherine - Gesso Panel 30 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic © 2035 by Agatha Kronberg. Powered and secured by Wix Una- Gesso Panel 24.5 x 24.5cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic

Girls II 90 x 60 cm Acrylic on Canvas 2023

Unfinished Still 20 x 20 cms Acrylic on canvas (2023)

Quilt of Fears In a collaboration with fellow students at Chelsea College of Art 2022 in 2022, we invited students to create a 30cm by 30cm square backed onto fabric, illustrating or capturing a fear or worry, creating a quilt. Sewing the quilt together as a group, we explored, engaged and discussed our fears. Making and talking, as individuals and as a college.

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Exhibitions MA Fine Art Summer Show 3 - 8th July 23 Echoes 8-11th June 2023. 11 Avenue Studios, South Kensington Echoes presents the work of three London-based artists working with family archives to launch enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten histories. Engaging with personal photographs and inherited objects, their painting practices explore how dialogues with the past locate the artist in a space of shared cultural memory. Painting items discovered in her family basement, Maggie Shafran projects a desire for familial connection onto the inanimate, inventing a world where the lines between inheritance and appropriation are blurred. StevieRay Latham’s haunted images explore the disjuncture between memory & and history by using painting as an interface where photography and oral histories can coalesce. Jane Hughes’ work evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny as the artist excavates a collection of photographs and films which had been hidden from her family for many years. Biographies: Maggie Shafran is an American artist residing in London completing her MA in painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Maggie’s practice examines her collection of thrifted and inherited items through an embodied approach to painting. Maggie received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College and a Graduate Diploma from RCA. Her artwork resides in prestigious collections throughout the US and in the UK and is represented by Gail Severn Gallery. Jane Hughes is a London-based contemporary artist. She is currently enrolled on an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Art having graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 2022. In her painting, Jane utilises her family photographic archive to interrogate the power that exists within the family dynamic and the authorship of memory. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her work is located in various private collections. StevieRay Latham is a South London-based artist and musician, currently studying for an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. StevieRay’s paintings combine family photographs and folkloric imagery to explore ideas of memory and remembrance. Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2014, he has performed and exhibited around the world and his works hang in private and public collections across the UK. Convergence 17-20th October 2023. A-B Galleries, Camberwell Art College Artists Showing Alexandra Diana Costea Emotion Etched: The Feel of Nature 2023 - Digital print on wallpaper and print-screen Alexandra is interested in creating artwork by combining photographs of natural scenery and printmaking to alleviate her anxious mind. She believes that nature has a therapeutic effect on the human brain. The artist uses natural landscapes to heal her mind and, in the process, to help others the same way it has helped her. Alexandra discovered the potential of healing through nature while dealing with her trauma and anxiety from when she was a sick child. Through drawing and printmaking, she wants to create compositions that can help people remember nature's potential for a stressed mind and body. At the same time, Alexandra hopes that her art immerses people in the same journey as her, the journey to heal and enjoy nature's beauty. Sofia Alrich Veytia Untitled 2023 - Hydro-coat etching on Hahnemühle paper 53 x 78c Sofia Alrich Veytia is a visual artist born in Mexico City, currently based in London. Her visual and theoretical research investigates the correspondence between spirituality, the natural realm, humanity, and the cosmos. She attempts to make substance of something that in its essence is transient, fleeting, or intangible, through amorphous figures that resemble the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously. She is currently working mainly with intaglio printmaking, photography, and video as a means of thinking through an image in various steps, digitally manipulating the source material, dissecting it, and transforming it, wherein each mark diverges from the original source and intertwines with another. Jane Hughes No Man’s Land 2023 - 7 paintings, acrylic on gesso board - Virginia, Sylvia, Patricia, Mileva, Elsa, Catherine, Una Jane’s practice explores ‘authority’, secrets and the obscured within the home through the mediums of paintings, film and installation. ‘No Man's Land’ is her series of portraits of some of history's forgotten wives. Women who, though married to renowned figures in the world of art, politics and science, have been anonymised, abandoned or erased from history. Psychologically powerful, these small-scale paintings force us to meet these women's intense and unflinching gaze and not turn away. By telling their stories Jane hopes to begin to open up the discourse on power as measured through absence and silence and make way for alternative histories to be told. Eleanor Street untitled 2023 - photo-emulsion on porcelain 5x7 cm Eleanor uses images of landscape to explore memory and the grief arising from the loss of both parents. Her work considers ways of navigating and containing unruly emotions and of attempting to capture and preserve particular moments spent in the landscape, in the face of fallible, fragile memory. Eleanor uses the idea of transitional objects to create tiny things which evoke or encapsulate something much larger; and describe intimate, personal emotions that also have universal salience. These two pieces use photographs taken by her father in Scotland nearly 30 years ago. Joy Stokes & Eleanor Street Dialectics of the Skin 2023 Fluid Dynamic 2023 Although Joy and Eleanor’s work differs conceptually, visually and methodologically, they have found a connection that has meant their interests and something have evolved in parallel, over the course of the MA. Dialectics of the Skin considers the paradox of the skin’s fragility in the context of lymphodema – needing regular heavy moisturisation with thick, greasy creams to prevent cracking and tearing – with its function as barrier between the body and world. Fluid Dynamics references the importance of water to our physical selves, as well as to our emotional being. Song Yuhuan Red 2023 - etchings on Somerset Satin paper Yuhuan uses abstraction to explore landscape as a metaphor for the female body. In her work, she reflects on her own experience and emotional expression as a woman. The red flowers and the ink-like horizon attempt to express the symbols of life force as women understand it and the personal experience of women’s existence. Joy Stokes etchings on Somerset Satin paper Carmen Van Huistedde porcelain Te Palandjian Garden Bed 2023 - Ink on starched paper Te Palandjian sculpts using the mark-making movements of digging. Her work, being as much about process as it is about materiality, attempts to transform naturally-sourced and man-made mediums—casting with them, compressing them, or revealing features of them—to uncover the critical role that materiality plays in the context of archaeology, landscape art, and the politics of the garden. By re-processing her materials over and over, from the primary holes she digs, to the tertiary, texturized and compressed paper cast of a plaster cast of that hole, the audience is pressed to analyse her initial digging action. Palandjian asks, what does it mean to study a dug artifact, as an archaeologist does, when the artifact is the hole itself? And thus, what happens when the phenomenology of hole-digging and the maker of the hole are the focus of analysis and critique?

Labour Dispute 190 x 120 cms. Acrylic on canvas The painting ‘Labour Dispute’ is set in a domestic sphere. Each of the characters is unavailable to each other or for each other. The setting is dark and unwelcoming. There is chaos all around and a sense of despair. Gaston Bachelard spoke of the house as holding ‘the topography of our intimate being’, (Bachelard, Jonas, 1994, p36) it is where we cross the threshold from the public into our private sphere. It can also be a prison. It is here, in this domestic environment, that female labour is required and must be endured, for if it is to be done well it must be invisible and done without complaint. 190 x 120 cms. Acrylic on canvas

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Feme Covert ‘The task of the spectre is to remind us that the past is an unfinished business. The logic of haunting thus disrupts the idea of chronological time; it de-synchronises time and unsettles space’. Orlow, U, 2016 Introduction I want, no, I need to start with a bit of family history, or perhaps it is safer to say a family story. My mother grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne during the ’30s and ’40s. It was a childhood defined by excoriating poverty and inferences of domestic violence. She left school at 13, and in 1946, at 16, she and her best friend hitched down to a bombed-out London in search of a ‘good’ husband – they never went back home. Following my parent’s marriage in 1955, my mother wrote to my father begging him not to visit her mother in Newcastle. She wrote, ‘’I hate to think of my childhood; I would rather forget it and pretend it never existed…..I resolved when I was very young to marry someone healthy and never have to worry about all the problems that I seem to have been facing from the day I was born; you just cannot imagine what it is like to feel insecure as a child and always be afraid’. He never met her mother, and my mother only went home one further time to organise the funeral when her mother died. My mother’s life was subsumed by my father’s. I have no pictures of my grandmother Marjorie or any of those women who went before her. She was illegitimate and fostered out as a baby, and then she, too went on to have an illegitimate baby, in turn, my mother’s sister. When Marjorie married John, my grandfather, she was already 34. He rarely found work, so s he looked after her four children and took paid work as a cleaner. She was and is an invisible wife. Her class and gender defined her a lot in life, and because of this, she has no place in the records. Her work as a housewife was undertaken in the privacy of the home, and as a cleaner, her work was un-unionised. She was powerless, trapped economically and socially, with her four children dependent on her meagre wages. He was ‘head of the house’, and she could not escape. My mother, on the other hand, married in the aftermath of the Second World War, a period in which the notion of the universal woman as white, heterosexual, middle-class and married pervaded society. ‘Woman’ was referred to without the divisions of class or race. Any aspirations for work always had in mind that as a ‘woman,’ you would have responsibilities as a homemaker. My mother duly gave up work on marriage, my father became the breadwinner, and they had five children in quick succession. I tell this brief, perhaps not brief enough, story because I know it has shaped my perspective on my life and it formed an early part of my research in my MA, which in turn has been translated into my painting and film; these are raw and personal topics for me, partly drawn from my own experience of being mothered, but also my own experience of being a mother. I had a longing to find these women, these ‘wives’ on my mother’s side who have hardly left a trace and bring them and their lived experience into the present, visible through the embodiment of painting. But in trying to do so, I had not appreciated how this would feel – it was too close to home and left me with an empty awareness of so many absences, absence of images, absence of records and an absence of archive – an absence of history. How, then, to create a boundary which would allow me to explore the ‘history’ of the wife, to tell stories and protect myself simultaneously? The work I produced in Unit 3 could be described as a significant Volte-face from the work I made during the previous Units, but I don’t think so. Strong ties and traces bind us – the archive and who is missing, absence, powerlessness, and loss. What has changed, and is a crucial development for me, is a shift towards a kinship beyond my family to that of the role of the ‘wife’ and her impotence and obscurity in a far broader social context. I have contextualised this research through the paradigm of feminist historiography. The melding of feminism and historical studies addresses methods and means of challenging the ‘grand historical narratives’ and releases me from the restrictions and tyranny of the ‘official’ archives, which were clearly absent. It was liberating and made way for the voices of the missing and eclipsed ‘wives’ I have chosen to paint, allowing them to be seen and heard. This is not about the recovery of ‘facts’ but is about searching out ways of telling their stories. It acknowledges that as subjects, history places women in the context of differences and that there is a need to understand the restrictions and rules imposed upon them, which contributes to their absence. So First of all – what is being a wife? The Bride of Frankenstein 1931 ‘When a small Brooke or little river incorporath with the Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name…as it were clouded and overshadowed, she hath lost her stream.’ The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights, or the Lawes Provision for Women – 1632 Thomas Edgar Historically, being a ‘wife’ can be summed up as not to exist. In Europe, since the 13th century, it was deemed that a married couple was one person, and that person was the husband. – the woman by marriage became a ‘Feme Covert’ or covered woman.’ she was literally considered to be hidden behind the man. Her very being suspended. Marriage was gendered and was seen as a transactional relationship between a man and a woman. Although marriage is not ‘natural’, it is entirely constructed; it is very seductive. For women, though, it is still ‘primarily a political experience and an institution that defines’ her work and identity (Oakley, 2021, p3). As an institution, marriage has enshrined inequality of the sexes into the statute book, and it has frequently been weaponised against women. The wife’s role in marriage was to provide what Ann Oakley describes as the ‘subterranean industry of wifely labour’ (Oakley, 2021), to be a housewife, and a formal license to bear children. The characteristic feature is one of exclusion in which her ‘work’ was unpaid and therefore deemed unremarkable, menial, and so simply not present. Why does it matter now? It matters because it reveals how ‘wives’ have been marginalised from history, made invisible and neglected. As Hilary Clinton said, and I paraphrase here, ‘Women do not get written out of history – they just never got written into it’. History has predominantly been a story about what men have been doing, particularly when it comes to those with a public reputation. If a woman is there at all, she will be tucked away, an adjunct to his story within the folders of his archive. It still reverberates and contaminates us now and has relevance to current debates about ongoing inequalities where patriarchal ways refuse to see or choose to forget. There is a need to reclaim these stories and to reframe our histories, to tell the stories we have been told differently. Caroline Steedman says that within the ‘official archives’, ‘mad fragments sit, waiting in the ‘indices of assigned categories to engage the imagination of the lonely researcher’ (Scott, 2011, p145). We just need to listen for ‘the silences and omissions’ to find what Adrian Rich calls ‘a whole new psychic geography to be explored.’ (Rich 1971 p269) My First wife Mouth – Gesso Panel 30 x 10 ( 2 cm deep) Oils I didn’t go out to find Sabrina Sidney; I initially went to the Foundling Museum in London to see an exhibition on motherhood. The written entry about Sabrina was small, so insignificant and of course, she was just one of the 100’s of children whose early lives were lived in that environment, but she shouted out to me. The foundling children were usually only identifiable by the tokens their mothers had left. They were then rebranded and retrained to accommodate the merchant classes, but by the nature of Thomas Day, Sabrina Stanley was different; she had an enticing story to tell. She was largely invisible, just this tiny wisp of a ghostlike presence, just out of my reach, hidden behind the despicable story of Thomas Day. Thomas was a notable figure, and she was abducted by him when she was only 12 as part of his experiment to create for himself a ‘perfect wife.’ In reading those few lines about how he had attempted to create a ‘perfect wife’, I passionately wanted to know more about her and not him. I felt outraged for her, for her lack of agency, for the sense that she was a supporting actor in his grand narrative, and I wanted to find her – to paint her, to show there was an alternative history than his, to destabilise that narrative which implied there was only one face, and that was the face of a man. Another Brief Story “He also resolved that she should be simple as a mountain girl, in her dress, diet and manners, fearless and intrepid as the Spartan wives and Roman heroines”. Anna Seward, a friend to Thomas ‘The Golden Stairs – Edward Burne Jones 1876-80 Sabrina Sidney was abandoned at the Foundling Hospital in 1757, shortly after she was born. She was named by her mother, Manima Butler, but this was changed to Anne Kingston on arrival at the hospital. She would have been educated to understand that she was a product of disgrace and that she would need to be humble, subservient, and deferential to survive. Thomas Day thought she was ideal for his social experiment to create the ‘perfect wife’ for himself, so he abducted her, deceiving the hospital of his actual intentions. The idea of a woman as a ‘signifier’ for men to live out his fantasies was not new; Ovid wrote of the myth of Pygmalion, who was so appalled at the wickedness of real women that he decided to carve himself the perfect woman out of ivory marble and name her Galatea. For Thomas, this ideal meant an unsullied girl who would be demure and subservient to his every whim and idea. He renamed her Sabrina Sidney, displaced her from all she had known, and began grooming her for marriage. By bestowing a new name on her, he signified his power, sense of ownership, and wish to obliterate her former identity. As part of her ‘training’ she was to dress plainly, eat frugally and be his sole domestic servant, but beyond this, Sabrina was also systematically maltreated. Thomas loosely based her ‘education’ on Rousseau’s theories that children needed to be taught to withstand adversity. However, Day took this to a different level – he insisted she stay still when he poured hot molten wax on her shoulders or put pins into her arms. She was not to cry out when he fired pistol shots into her skirts or close to her ear. She was regularly submerged in cold baths or made to walk into the lake in front of the house, going up to her chin and then told to lie in the marsh until the sun had dried her clothes. After a year, he concluded that she had ‘failed’ and so she would not do as a ‘perfect wife’. He sent her to boarding school, and apart from another brief attempt at training her when she was 17, he never saw her again. However, he continued to oversee her life as he feared she would become indolent. When she was only 32, he died, but still, his life would continue to impact hers as his friends and associates wrote various biographies, which included their interpretations of what had happened to her. So, I was inaccurate when I said Sabrina was the first wife because she never quite made the grade. Her story continues to be repeated and re-told in biographies, histories, romcoms and literature – from My Fair Lady to Pretty Woman. These stories continue to be the same ones – where men who, by the measure of their social ranking or wealth, maintain patriarchal control over women who have none. They are about women being helpless before being re-constructed and transformed into the ‘wives’ men desire. I wanted to express through paintings what Sabrina had been put through in these horrifying ordeals, but not as an explicit spectacle of suffering – to attempt to put together pieces of the forgotten. To create an indexical mode of representation that demanded that we recognise her, The paintings needed to reveal themselves subtly. What she had been through was kept private, a secret, and she could not protest. Protest meant banishment. I needed the paintings to reflect this experience. There are eight smaller paintings (24.5 squared) on Gesso Boards and a scaled-up painting (120 cm squared) on canvas of Sabrina’s eye portrayed as a Georgian ‘lover’s eye’. I wanted the surface to be smooth and untextured, and the colour palette deliberately restrained, aesthetically pleasing and subdued. This juxtaposed with the subject matter and highlighted how Sabrina was only ever almost there. I needed the audience to be drawn to the paintings, to be curious about why there were these cropped images of a young person, to ask themselves whether this was the same person and what the narrative was – to encourage them to become a voyeur. Where the smaller paintings focussed on body parts, none were as small as Sabrina’s eye, and this was the focus of my large painting. There is an ambiguity – is Sabrina looking out at us, or we at her? The composition is very simple for each painting. There is only one focus in these cropped images: her eyes, mouth, or other body parts, which allows the viewer to make their own assumptions. They are a series; I cannot imagine one being shown without the others. Lovers Eye, 120 x 120 cm, Acrylic on Canvas Somehow, the painting was not enough. Painting did not feel enough; I wanted to find out how to incorporate the written word to interplay with the images, I was interested in Bourgeois’ use of the diary and writings in her work, so I revisited my own diary from when I was 12 years old. Could I use this to have a conversation with Sabrina in the way Celia Paul had with Gwen John in her Letters to Gwen John? I had felt an emotional connection between the child Jane and Sabrina, but my diaries told me nothing. They were written with an awareness of being one of five children who were always willing to snoop and spy on each other– they were bland. They speak of a history where girls of my generation did sewing classes, had roast beef on Sundays and found innovative games to play during power strikes, but I couldn’t do as Celia did and find that meeting place between me and Sabrina without the dangers of it becoming a horror story. And on the here and now, on my own experience of marriage and my mother’s life as a married woman – I do have my diaries but feel the boundaries slipping in the wrong direction. I was unsure about bringing in a more personal voice again. Moyra Davey is an artist who uses diary-like writing combined with photos of her domestic environment to ‘go into the world of other people’s writing and take snapshots’. Margaret Iverson suggests that Davey’s work can be seen as both ‘autofiction’ and ‘Autotheory’. (Iverson 2014, p8) Autotheory is a transformative literary genre that provides an ethical and open way for the narrator to reflect on their vulnerable self while incorporating critical theory’s terminologies and methodologies. So, it is potentially an avenue for me, but I am writing about people I don’t know and cannot know as they are missing from history. Like me, Bourgeois was white, privileged, and middle class. Like her, I have explored emotional neglect – the neglect of children but also women. But in ‘Immaculate Conception’ and the series of paintings that came after it, ‘No-Man’s Land, ‘ I am focusing on the other, she on her own experience, and my sources are text-based. So, am I working from a place of empathy? Is it possible for artists to make those who are eclipsed or just missing from history visible from this position? Each of the ‘characters’ in my two separate bodies of recent work came to my attention as a consequence of the actions of notorious men, and I was and am furious. I had what Joan Scott calls a ‘fervent desire’, that gift of the muses, to transform the subject (Scott, JW 2011, p21). Claire Hemmings, in her book “why stories Matter’ takes a deep dive into empathy in Western Feminist theory and how it has represented a way of developing ‘ethical relations to other people’ (Hemmings 2011 p162) and a means of confronting the authority of, in this case, me, to paint and write about Sabrina, Virginia or Patricia. How could I establish a genuine relationship with someone no longer here? Was I, in fact, in danger of sublimating myself in the place of these women? ‘Good empathy’ would allow them to be independent of me, yet I needed to acknowledge the limits of my knowledge. Feminist historians have always sought to tell the stories of those who have been left out, but I, in attempting to fill the gaps, will be bringing my own position in history to their stories– I cannot avoid this. It is what I do with it that matters. As Hemmings says, we need ‘instead to tell stories differently, rather than telling different stories. (Hemmings 2011 p5) Creating a new language So, to reclaim and tell the stories of those who have been ‘left out’ and those who have suffered at the hands of others differently, we need access to a new language and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. Adrianne Rich warned this would be like walking on ice ‘as we try to find language and images for consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us’. (Rich 1971, p17) Tiya Miles and Saidiya Hartman use critical fabulation to this effect. Where the archives are bare, they find a new language to ‘illuminate ‘the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead’ (Dintino 2023) . They use artefacts as archives to build stories and imagine lives within parameters which rely on different historical data sources. This is a way of calling out ‘history’, who has recorded it, and who has tried to determine what stories got told. Exploring this idea within my own practice, I ask how I could have done this. I could have perhaps requested to see the token that Sabrina’s mother had left and to have built a story from that – perhaps I have, in a way, managed this. The tokens I did see moved me, and I could relate deeply to the love invested in the rag-tag collections of buttons, bows and bottle tops left by the parents of the foundlings. Still, my reactions to Sabrina and all the other women I have painted came from a deeper well, and it was more personal. Carmen Maria Machado’s extraordinary, intoxicating ‘memoir’ ‘In the Dream House is, at one level, a straightforward tale of her experience of domestic violence at the hands of her female lover. What fractures this as a memoir is she is forced to build that architecture of language if she is going to speak of these unspeakable things. She met an ‘archival silence’ where the tales of other victims were missing. ‘Sometimes stories are destroyed, sometimes they are never uttered in the first place… what is left in or left out is a political act” (Machado 2020). She conjures up a dream house where her story can live. It is a structure ‘surrounded by literary trappings—epigraphs, prologue—that lend it legitimacy’ (Waldman 2023). She repositions and unravels the narrative, taking us with her in this experience that did not and could not be made sense of. I listened to Lubaina Himid talk about her work and how she, by making larger-than-life cut-out people who have, up until now, been written out of our cultural history, can be made alive and present to us. They fill whole rooms; we can hear their stories, and we can say their names. Himid infuses their stories with humour and draws our attention to race, power, and colonialism issues. She has created a new language, too Imperfect wives ‘The unusual thing about misogyny is the elaborate, intellectual superstructure that has for so long supported and celebrated, not as a blind spot as a pernicious ideology, but, on the contrary, as a perfect vision (Smith, Z 2019) Could I learn from artists such as Lubaina and paint a series of ‘wives’ in my attempt to reclaim and reframe the tradition of historical painting and grand narratives by putting the eclipsed, obscured, or erased wives of the ‘great and the good’ into the picture frame, posing political questions about ‘history’, representation and what stories get told. ‘No Man’s Land’ is a body of work conceived and born from my research for the ‘Immaculate Conception’ series. Sabrina’s story was, I hope, a unique one, but the institute of marriage, one she was so vociferously being trained for, still enshrines inequalities in the legislature. I began by reading about Virginia Poe, who was only 13 when she married Edgar Alan Poe. Still, this reading then led to further reading, and I became aware there was no shortage of other male literary giants who had exploited, abused or ignored their wives – but then why stop here? I began to look at scientists, actors, artists, politicians, …. As Carmela Cuiraru spells out in her book ‘Lives of the Wives: ‘The history of wives is one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonised, marginalised, misrepresented and silenced’ and ‘history is to fame as wife is to footnote, their archival information stored under their husband’s collection’. (Cuiraru, C 2023, p6). I wanted to take all the women I read about and revisit and reposition their place in history so their stories would become visible and would no longer be silent. To pay tribute to their achievements, honour their stoicism and sacrifices and celebrate who they were. It was and continues to be a work in progress. I wanted walls of women, a shrine almost. The Wall of Wives So Far ‘No Man’ Land’, showing in exhibition ‘Convergence’, A-B Gallery, Camberwell, October 2023 Each woman I have chosen to paint to date has had different experiences of being wives. Some, like Sylvia, are anything but invisible, but her story is still inexorably intertwined with her husband, Ted Hughes. Patricia Neal likewise was the ‘breadwinner’ whilst married to Roald Dahl, but she had to downplay this to protect his masculine pride. Like Sylvia, she would be abandoned for another wife. This series is titled ‘No Man’s Land’ Although I continued to paint on Gesso Boards – they are smaller, at only 15 cm squared. I chose to paint in acrylics rather than oils, which I had used for the ‘Immaculate Conception’ paintings. The colours are more potent and visually more there. They are unmistakably faces of women who have been squeezed into tiny spaces and are looking towards us with their questioning gaze. In the portrait of Patricia, I have used Chiaroscuro’s technique to capture the distress on her face. Virginia Virginia – Gesso Panel 15 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Married to Edgar Allan Poe at the age of 13. I began this series with a small painting of Virginia. Only one small historical painting of her exists, and it was painted just hours after her death. I thought about her youth and the descriptions I read about her. She was said to have dark, almost black hair and eyes – and she was only 24 when she died of consumption. It was this wasting away, both metaphorically and physically, that I wished to capture. She wears the ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ as an earring. In my room at home, she is the one who disappears and gets lost on my shelf, surrounded by the other wives. I then painted Una and Catherine. They both went through numerous guises before I settled on what felt like the correct version. Una When Una met Radycliffe Hall, she adopted a conservatively gendered wifely role within their relationship, wearing what was considered feminine attire. However, after Radycliffe died, Una took to wearing her lovers’ clothes, tweeds, male jackets and hats. It is from this period that I chose to paint her. Una had been a 13-year-old protégé at the Royal College of Art, but once she met Radycliffe, she dedicated her life to her: ‘a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry’ (Ciuraru, 2023, p94) They lived as a conventional and politically conservative married couple. Radycliffe (John) believed he was a ‘congenital invert’, a ‘masculine soul heaving in the female bosom’ and that Una should be a ‘good submissive wife’ and abstain from any ambitions of her own. Catherine Catherine– Gesso Panel 30 x 15 cm. ( 3.8 cm deep) Acrylic Charles Dickens – his thoughts on Catherine: “A page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank …it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.” (Forster, 2011 (p 136) My interpretation of Catherine is from a time before she began producing endless babies, and her life was stolen from her. The attire, the colours I selected, and her hair reflect the period in which she lived. She is reading and having some time for herself. She was an accomplished author, cook and actor despite producing ten children and experiencing a number of miscarriages during her marriage to Charles Dickens. When he left after 22 years of marriage, his prime interest was to preserve his reputation. He first tried to incarcerate Catherine in an asylum, but when this failed, he encouraged ugly rumours to circulate that she was an alcoholic and an ‘incompetent mother’. He then moved from her home and forbade the children from seeing her. She has become misremembered by history as the ‘epitome of a frumpy and dreary wife.’ Patricia Patricia Neal was a successful actress married to Roald Dahl, considered by many to be an emotionally detached bully and a serial womaniser who nevertheless had the highest expectations on how his wife should meet his needs. The advice of a friend of Roald’s to Patricia on how to save her marriage: “You can make the money, but Roald must handle it… you must do all the cooking. Wash the dishes and do everything in the house. " ( Ciuraru, 2023 p514) While still in her 30s, she suffered a catastrophic series of strokes, which came soon after losing her eldest child to measles. Her career was shattered, and her independence lost; Roald now had complete control of her – her friends variously described him as her dog trainer, drill sergeant or traffic policeman, but she did recover under his humiliating regime. By this stage, he was a highly successful and respected author and had also begun an affair with Felicity Crosland. This affair went on for 11 years before he finally left Patricia. Later, Felicity was asked whether she had had any regrets in breaking up their marriage (he was, of course, blameless): ‘It was a particularly difficult situation because Pat had a stroke and was not well. I don’t know how he managed to bring up these children, run a house, do the school runs and write this major volume of work. He was so worn out, so needing to be looked after, which of course Pat could not do’… … (Ciuraru, 2023, p568) I painted Patricia caught in the camera lights, part tearful, part terrified. Mileva Mileva 15.24 cm square , Acrylic on Gesso Board Einstein’s’ first wife. His letter to Mileva after their divorce. She was seeking some recognition: You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your words if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important? When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do. (Gagnon, P 2016) Mileva was a highly educated, pioneering physicist whose ambitions were thwarted by a social and economic system that could not and would not recognise her. There is much debate as to whether she contributed to some of his greatest theories – although there are far too many papers working hard to prove she didn’t – she was nevertheless the bedrock which allowed him the time to work. She did what so many women do when faced with such limited choices: she became the domestic and the mother. Her strength and her intelligence gaze out at us. Mileva had abandoned her aspirations. Despite being a physicist in a period when it was almost unheard of for women to be one, and whose individual contributions are impossible to disentangle from Einstein’s, she has been denied recognition. In 2004, her unmarked grave, number 9,357, was finally identified – another woman who had been excluded from history. Elsa As Einstein’s second wife, Elsa was for him a marriage of convenience; she was his administrator and organiser while he continued to have numerous relationships with other women, safe in the knowledge that she would remain dutiful and loyal. As she lay dying and in great pain, he was not available to her. Sylvia ‘Make him happy: cook, play, read… Never accuse, or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force ’ (Plath 1956) Sylvia wanted equality in her marriage to Ted Hughes but was left feeling suffocated by domesticity and a sense that she had failed. She is here because she was put in the position of contemplating whether to choose between her writing and marriage, because of the evidence Ted Hughes was emotionally and potentially physically abusive in their marriage and because he abandoned her with two small children. In Conclusion In exploring the question ‘How do we tell the stories’ of those deliberately obscured from history, I recognise I have taken a circuitous route. I started my paintings about Sabrina’s life to reframe her story to make her visible, not just a part of Thomas’s story. Similarly, I have followed this idea in my paintings of wives, placing them centre stage. The issues I encountered in painting them is, of course, the nub of the problem: they are often missing from the records or are only add-ons in men’s lives. I was trying to address this through the embodiment of paint, but I wanted/needed narrative too, and this is where all the interesting research comes in – the critical fabulation, auto theory, using diaries and artefacts, all these ways to tell stories. However, in touching on a subject which, as in Machado’s memoir on domestic abuse, is unpalatable and unspoken of, I found myself being drawn away into different conversations too. Conversations about domestic violence and, in the case of Sabrina, child abuse. These subjects cannot just be tagged onto this essay; they require far more attention than this essay can give them. I know too that this essay is full of my own unanswered questions, but fundamentally, I tried to preserve Sabrina, Patricia, Sylvia, Mileva, Una, Catherine, Elsa and Virginia’s integrity and tried to make them not just people to whom things were done to. History is just stories we construct; it is open to interpretation, and feminist historians will keep exploring how we tell the stories despite there being people who, in positions of privilege, have a vested interest in preserving these inequalities. Women artists, writers and feminist historiographers have found extraordinary ways of addressing what has been done to them or telling the stories of others for whom great injustices have been meted out – stories and histories we can hear, bear, and internalise. References Bourgeois, L., Bernadac, M.-L. and Obrist, H.-U. (2008) Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the father reconstruction of the father: Writings and interviews 1923-1997. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ciuraru, C. (2023) Lives of the wives. HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS INC. Coviello, P. (2003) ‘Poe in love: Pedophilia, morbidity, and the logic of slavery’, ELH, 70(3), pp. 875–901. doi:10.1353/elh.2003.0026 . Dintino, T.C. (2023) Tiya Miles and Saidiya Hartman: Critical fabulation – claiming the narrative and overriding the supremacist archive, Nasty Women Writers. Available at: https://www.nastywomenwriters.com/tiya-miles-and-saidiya-hartman-critical-fabulations-claiming-the-narrative-and-overriding-the-supremacist-archive/ (Accessed: 06 November 2023). Does Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric deserve credit for some of his work? (2018) The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/mileva-maric-albert-einsten-physics-science-history-women-a8396411.html (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Drama on 4, the Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney – what happened when one man set out to create the perfect wife… (no date) BBC Radio 4. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BNrqJ9FrSxfdcJstK9qpLn/what-happened-when-one-man-set-out-to-create-the-perfect-wife (Accessed: 30 October 2023). Filbee, M. (1980) A woman’s place: an illustrated history of women at home from the Roman Villa to the Victorian Town House. London: Ebury Press. Forster, J. (2011) The life of Charles Dickens [Preprint]. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139107877. Fournier, L. (2021) Autotheory as feminist practice in art, writing, and criticism. MIT Press. Gagnon, P. (2016a) The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s first wife, Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/ (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Heathcote, E. (2012) The meaning of home. London: Frances Lincoln. Hemmings, C. (2011) Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Durham, Car du N.: Duke University Press. Iles, K. (2012) Constructing the eighteenth-century woman: The adventurous history of Sabrina Sidney. Dissertation. Iversen, M. (2021) ‘The diaristic mode in contemporary art after Barthes’, Art History, 44(4), pp. 798–822. doi:10.1111/1467-8365.12587. Lennon, R. (2023) Wedded wife: A feminist history of marriage. London: Aurum Press. Lesser, W. (1991) His other half: Men looking at women through art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Machado, C M (2020) In the Dream House. A Memoir. Carmen Maria Machado. www.audible.co.uk . October 2023 Modleski, T. (1999) Old wives’ tales. Feminist re-visions of film and other fictions.: Feminist re-visions of film and other fictions. London: I. B. Tauris. Moore, W. (2014) How to create the perfect wife. Orion Publishing Group. Mulvey, L. (2022) The greatest film of All time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, BFI. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/greatest-film-all-time-jeanne-dielman-23-quai-du-commerce-1080-bruxelles (Accessed: 07 November 2023). Nayder, L. (2011) The Other Dickens: A life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Oakley, A. (2021). Forgotten Wives. How Women Get Written Out of History, Policy Press. Oakley, A. (1990) Housewife. London etc.: Penguin Books. Orlow, U. (n.d.). Home. [online] Available at: https://urielorlow.net/. Rich, A. (1971) ‘“When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision”’, Available Means, pp. 268–282. doi:10.2307/j.ctt5hjqnj.48. Roberts, E. (1996) A woman’s place: An oral history of working-class women 1890-1940. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Robinson, F. (2017) Room of one’s own. Macat International Limited. Sagas of She (2021) Mileva Marić., Sagas of She. Available at: https://sagasofshe.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/mileva-maric/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CYou%20made%20me%20laugh%20when,had%20not%20accomplished%20something%20important. (Accessed: 02 November 2023). Scott, J.W. (2003) Feminism and history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, J.W. (2011) Fantasy of Feminist history. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Z. (2019) ‘The Muse at Her Easel’, The New York Journal, 21 November. Tsjeng, Z. (2018a) Forgotten women – the writers. London: Cassell Books. Tsjeng, Z. (2018b) Forgotten women: The artists. London: Cassell Illustrated, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd. Waldman, K. (2019) ‘https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/carmen-maria-machados-many-haunted-stories-of-a-toxic-relationship’, 19 October. Woolf, V. (2022) Room of one’s own. S.l.: INDOEUROPEANPUBLISHING CO. Author Jane Hughes is a London-based mixed-media artist whose primary focus is on painting. She reclaims and reframes the traditions of historical painting and grand narratives by putting the eclipsed, obscured, or erased wives of the ‘great and the good’ into the picture frame, posing political questions about ‘history’, representation and what stories get told. She graduated from MA Fine Art: Painting in 2023.

Holiday Haunts Acrylic 162 x 100 cms on canvas (2022) (sold) Richter spoke of the family photograph as being in a particular class –a snapshot, an icon for the contemplation of and futile battle against mortality. It is traditionally constructed in a chronological and cyclical repetitions, of births, christenings and holidays. ‘The family is making itself through image’. But all these occasions are distinguished by ‘pleasure, happy beginnings, happy middles, but there must not be endings’ The overarching message is ‘We will be happy’ (Annette Kuhn 2002, p 23) It is the performance and contrivance in the family album which I probe using my own family archive - producing a sense of disquiet, a sense of something not being quite as it should be, a glimpse at what is not quite visible in these choreographed poses