This body of work is my visual response to a literary text of the same title written by a forgotten trilingual writer of Polish origin Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925) who died in a mental asylum in the UK. The unpublished novel tells a story of a migrant woman from Galicia, Eastern Europe who travels west to Paris, New York and London to find employment, and more importantly to fulfill her creative ambitions of becoming a writer. The rigid rules of patriarchal society, lack of opportunities for women, poverty and disillusionment lead to her mental instability – to hysteria as it was called at the time. I used the performative aspect of this condition to speak out about the tragedy of talented but unfulfilled women for whom madness was the only way out of a miserable life. Through enactment and staging she recreates the extreme emotions brought out by extreme living conditions, and expresses them in black and white photographs. Through this subtle, meditative take on female vulnerability I’d like to challenge the historical, photographic accounts of female hysterics typically exploited photographically by male medics.
