Exhibition:

Katherine Mansfield had a short life, but lived it to the full. She felt restricted by colonial life, and sought a more bohemian, rebellious lifestyle.

Katherine Mansfield House has been restored, and filled with things relevant to Mansfield’s life. She only actually lived there until she was five, meaning many of the objects, furniture, and overall atmosphere of the house may say more about the adults living in the house than Mansfield herself. Especially to someone who visits not knowing much about her – the place has a feeling of being old, a shrine to her as a historical figure on the surface, and only when you look deeper do you find out more about her as a person. She also wanted her journals to be burned after her death, but her husband instead edited and published them, making her seem more sickly and mild, rather than the risk-taking, charismatic individual that she was.

I wanted to portray her in a more real way, a sculpted version of her, smirking over her shoulder watching out of the corner of her eye, as well as the layers of Mansfield as a person and the historical portrayal of her.

I was inspired by the fact that the wallpaper in the house that was restored from the original designs, to make my own designs relating to other aspects of her life.

These are in the back of the frame; first, the torn wallpaper and a neat, ‘published’ page of a journal. It then unfolds and reveals other designs – heart shaped violets (a symbol of sapphic desire in the early 1900s) to represent her relationships with women, oak leaves to represent her life and schooling in England, ferns for her childhood in New Zealand, an ‘unedited’ messy version of her writing, and red and black roses and thorns to represent her wild lifestyle and passion- these last two being visible from the front.

Rationale:

In this paper I wanted to learn a lot of techniques that I’d only tried briefly before, (or not at all), like modelling figures, photographing miniatures, papercraft, printmaking, and using the laser cutter. The course of my project ended up taking me away from some of those to others which meant I didn’t learn some of them in as much depth as I could have, but I did open up the options more for my own practice. Because I ended up spending more time learning new things I didn’t explore as many options for my final as I could have. If I were to do it again I would possibly like to do something different or more elaborate, or even just spend more time on the patterns of the prints, or making the way the head is turned in the frame a little less awkward. If I had time to lino cut my final print plates instead of using lasercut MDF I think that would’ve had higher quality results. However, I am happy with my final product.