Inspiration Station: Patty Carroll- Anonymous Women: Draped
Time to be inspired.
We are on our first inspiration station, how exciting. As someone who does a lot of creative scouting as part of my job I’m always stumbling across and finding incredible talent, books & series that I think should be shared. But a lot of the time I have no-one to really share them with, enter you Substack audience- mwahaha.
For this month I have chosen a series which I love by Patty Caroll called ‘Draped’ as part of her ‘Anonymous Woman’ series. Why for November? Because they kinda resemble ghosts & I’m still feeling spooky and that is all there is to it. But I’ll give you some more context on the series & the artist below, so you too can be inspired.
Patty Carroll is an American female photographer since the 70’s who has been exhibited & held within collections at the MOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art & Art Institute of Chicago. Anonymous Women is her most recent series which currently consists of three parts: Demise, Reconstructed & Draped. These are studio installations that camouflage the subject in figures of drapery or domestic objects, creating in her words a game of ‘hide and seek’ between the viewers and the Anonymous Woman of the frame.
Amongst the three parts, Draped is one of my favourites, in its pure simplicity amongst the others. Utilising vintage heavy drapes, Carroll creates almost optical illusions where you need to find the figure amongst exquisite and often busy patterns. Inspired by her time in the UK where she taught at the Royal College of Art & London College of Printing, at this point in the 90’s she found that lots of the houses were adorned with really elaborate drapes, this was mainly because central heating hadn’t been around for very long and so thick, decorated curtains had become a household norm.
When Carroll decided to move back to the US, she was redecorating a 50’s ranch house which led her to go on somewhat of a decorating spree that really led her to question her relationship with the home, in her words- “A home is a place of retreat and a place of power. [But while] women are safe in their homes, at the same time, there can become this obsession with decoration — and that can take over your identity.”
An obsession with decoration is something I unfortunately do relate to, & I think now more than ever with the home, very much driven by Tik Tok culture, how your space is seen & perceived is a real extension of your own personal style and taste- and something to further be judged on, if not in keeping with societal standards and trends. A survey by Hillary Blinds two years ago found that on average London residents spend ‘£5,781 a year on decorating and purchasing new furnishings’. Which if anything just shows this investment into the domestic we are willing to make on a financial level for it to feel personal to us.
Back to Carroll, after purchasing her dream house she came to the realisation that this had been the house of the idealised life from when she was a child in the fifties and what this said about the place of the woman in the domestic. So her series began. The women are camouflaged, part of the house, blending into its walls. That this camouflage of the individual is hidden behind this interior design facade, where the household objects become an indication of her status, wealth or personality. How the women are draped reference a variety of women throughout history, to Carroll they especially relate to the nuns of her youth that lacked any form of individualisation, but they have also been linked to Renaissance statues, ancient Greeks, burkas, the Virgin Mary, and even court judges.
What I love most however, is how she says that the portraits are also of different kinds of women, even though each one you can’t see, but that their drapes, position & pose reflect more. And when you have a look at each one you can oddly see that, despite at the same time really seeing nothing at all.
I think that again, in this phase of technology where we often bare all for the sake of acceptance and understanding, I find a series like this which is the real opposite of all that stands for to be encapsulating.
Now I’m off to go and buy some drapes of my own, maybe I’ll save on my heating bill too.
References:
https://lenscratch.com/2013/08/patty-carroll-anonymous-women-draped/