Jane Hughes
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‘Immaculate Conception’ -
Documenting Sabrina and the making of the perfect
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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The Applicant
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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‘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.
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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.
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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):
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‘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)
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Patricia observed that success did not mellow Roald Dahl ‘
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‘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.
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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:
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“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:
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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)
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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:
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“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)
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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.
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Nayder, L. (2011) The other Dickens: A life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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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.
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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
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‘ a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry’ (Ciuraru, 2023, p94)
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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.
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Ciuraru, C. (2023) Lives of the wives. Harper Collins Publishers Inc
Painting (and some film)
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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
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Immaculate Conception
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No Man’s Land and ‘Lover’s Eye.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And on film
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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.
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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.
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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 .