This post is part of three and is best viewed in conjunction with the other two which are here and here .
The later years, New Hampshire and New York
Untitled, 1980
Untitled, 1980
Woodman spent three weeks as resident at the MacDowell Colony in Petersburg, New Hampshire. She appeared to feel somewhat out of her comfort zone in a rural environment. In a letter to her friend Betsy, written on the back of a study of birch trees, she wrote: 'Nature? What am I supposed to do with nature?' and talked about her eagerness to return to working indoors. Much of her work in this three-week period wrestles with this question.
In this work she undercut any easy treatment of nature, clumsily taping plants to her or her model's arms. In one series she photographed stands of birch trees that grew on the property. In several of these pictures, she has wrapped or bandaged her wrists and forearms in long curls of shed bark. The strips curling around her wrists recall the peeling wallpaper of earlier Providence pictures in which her body appears engulfed, even devoured by its environment - like Daphne caught in a perpetual state of transition into a laurel tree, Woodman once again adeptly straddles the material and the evanescent.
Untitled, 1980
Untitled, 1979
Untitled, 1979
Is Woodman's work simply a feminist inquiry into the overlapping arenas of female subjecthood and objecthood?
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
It Must be Time for Lunch Now, 1979
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80
Some Disordered Interior Geometries, 1980-81
Some Disordered Interior Geometries, 1980-81
Untitled, 1979-80
Untitled, 1979-80.
'But latelly I find a sliver of mirror is simply to slice an eyelid'.
Peterborough* NH
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