Whatever happens after Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy?
Red Deer artist Alysse Bowd wonders how the “maidens” of literature — including Elizabeth from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice — cope with their next stage of life. What transpires in all the months and years that unfold after their told story ends?
Somewhere between maidenhood and motherhood falls a shadow, says Bowd, who seeks to shine some light on it through her exhibit The Pink Cloudless at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery.
Bowd explains that the archetypal women in historic literature tend to be either “maiden, mother or crone” — but what of the years between?
In The Pink Cloudless, Bowd is exploring the first interval of womanhood. She compares the “dormancy” that lies between being a maiden and becoming a mother to the pressing of a flower which both “preserves and stagnates the subject.”
Much of her ceramic and photographic works deal with the dichotomy of the home, which “serves to protect but also to imprison,” is comforting and yet claustrophobic.
Bowd, who is married but not a mother, believes a lot of women have conflicted feelings over domestic roles. They are often torn between pursuing their own aspirations or giving up some of these to raise children.
While attempts can be made to balance both, Bowd suggests devoting more energy to career necessitates having less for your children. Nobody can really have it all.
Her large photographic images, taken while Bowd was in artistic residency in Medicine Hat’s Ewart Duggan House, suggest a struggle between a woman and her home.
In one image, a female is about to escape through a window and shimmy down a rope made of sheets. In another, the house seems to envelop her — sheer curtains obviating her form, or a linen table cloth spreading out on top of her.
In other images, the woman is metaphorically devouring the house, or as Bowd puts in her artist statement: “She regurgitates the dining room table, a lampshade and parts of a bed frame. Furrowed brow, the rooms are empty, her stomach growling.”
The Pink Cloudless includes several ceramic doll houses, which Bowd has created and chaotically festooned with architectural elements.
One of the exhibit’s themes is “the cyclical yearning for something that is always out of reach,” she said — such as perfectionism.
Bowd, who has exhibited across Canada and holds a Master’s of Fine Arts Degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, hopes viewers will try to read her images as they might a poem.
Through personal interpretations of these messages, she hopes viewers will become more attuned to their own feelings about women’s roles.
The exhibit runs to Oct. 28.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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