Emmeline Armitage

Extract from ‘Red’

April 

“See the art” I had told myself, and so wound up at one of London’s most lauded exhibitions of that month. In the way that I often enjoyed going to the cinema without watching the trailer for the film I was about to see, I had equally enjoyed taking a whim on a Saturday in the Tate Britain for an artist whose work I had never before encountered. On being handed a small, purple leaflet with a picture of a woman – pipe in hand, spread at the knees, draped in colourful fabric and surrounded by creatures of folklore and myth – I was at once richly ignorant and curious. I read about Paula Rego, a woman born in Lisbon in 1935 under the Salazar regime, painting out against the oppressions of her childhood, her deep grief, her bodily guilt and womanly frustrations with the world.

The exhibition started here: 1. A Subversive Vision.

Salazar Vomiting the Homeland, 1960 

I see you: blood and bile, war and wings, sharp-bellied. This is the remains of a daughter of the state, marking each dark corner with muddy yellow and fading white. Against a canvas of ‘hard to read’ we have made it here, in the gut of all things authoritarian, weeping with whatever salt is left from the table. She is asked to defy her name, to graffiti her homeland with a brush and broken promises.

I see you: strange animal pressed to the corner of the earth, a hedgehog sting where genitals should be, a smoking pipe or cigarette within a tangled web of cartilage, or spilled red wine. Stains and miscommunication.

I see you: thing which you are not, asking to be understood.

I walked almost hypnotically through the first and second rooms of the exhibition, transfixed by a pain that was not my own, and yet one that somehow resonated with me. In the section ‘Fantasy and Rebellion’, I was drawn to a painting called ‘The Little Murderess’, seemingly as were the couple next to me.

“I mean, I’m back now after being on holiday,” the guy said, not quietly. “And of course, there was a dead body, and I was like woah, here we go, back at it again.” I stared straight ahead, at the painting of a little girl with a strangulation device in her hands.

“That’s the thing about being a paramedic, and resuscitation, you know.”  

“What?” his girlfriend prodded back.

“Sometimes it’s just better to let them die.”

The Little Murderess, 1987

*SNAP* goes the ribbon that she tugs and makes taut whilst closing in. There is darkness in her eyes, fire in her belly, roots in her hair. Nasty Girl – this one sees death before her very eyes, coaxes a limp body to her sight and considers the chokehold as a game only she can win. A crane watches on, no baby in its parted lips, no sun to seek or fly to. A white shirt – or is that a bedspread? A slumped body? – hangs below her feet. No sound like that of a man dying.

Paula Rego was sent by her father to The Slade School in 1952 at the age of 16. She had grown up in an inaccessible world, closed-off to her by a political system that actively discouraged female autonomy and with it, creativity. She learnt to dream only through images and stories passed down to her, often via the maternal line and particularly through her grandmother, who cared for her when her parents left Portugal, and their daughter, for England. From the young age of 4 her artistic eye was wild and imaginative, her early experiments on canvas pulsing with rebellious instinct. She was drawn consistently to the female body, to the powerful woman and the woman caught with power. She mapped onto human-animal relationships those with herself and her lovers, with her children, and with her deepest anxieties about the world. In twisted interpretations of classic fairy tales she exposed the macabre realities of the lessons women are taught from birth. In 1998, she would respond to Portugal’s abortion referendum with a series of works depicting various women about to undergo that procedure.

Untitled ‘Girl and Dog’ Series, 1986

Dog and girl are one, just as God and girl are not. Two heads, one body. A dog is tamed as woman is rendered absurd. A little girl in a blue dress wraps a chain necklace around her animal, whose droopy eyes offer no protest. Her armband is that of spiked gold; her face, although obscured, most definitely concentrating.

Girl shaving dog. Girl with black braids and strong grip on the muzzle with blade in hand to slice dog’s neck. Girl in slip-on black plimsoles and ankle socks, perched on a velvet blue chair, whilst dog places paws on lap and stares upward, ready to be cut.

Sitting, again, this time with dog on lap, gripping him by the jaw with a backwards twisting hand. The dog is yellow, toy-like, teeth emanating slightly. This girl has no name.

At The Slade, as she began experimenting with oils and pastels, Rego met Victor Willig, an Egyptian-born British painter who was at the time married to another artist. The two began an affair that would result, over a number of years but beginning when she was 18, in Rego having several abortions for the potential children Willig felt unable to support due to his other existent relationship. They married in 1959, after Willig had divorced from his first wife, and after Rego had decided to keep their first-born child, taking herself and the baby to Portugal. When they eventually returned to London, Willig was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Rego became his attentive, full-time carer. In the year of his death (1988) Rego had been working on ‘The Dance’, a painting in which Willig himself had suggested she include a male figure. The final work shows Victor, amongst other figures, dancing with a woman who is not Rego – a likely reference to his extra-marital affairs, of which he had many.

The Dance, 1988

A wonderful night for a Moondance, lemons on skirts that sway in the breeze. Here are eight women of every age and hair colour with the same carved faces, same soft eyelids, same stern lips. Two men in similar grey suits with knowing looks, leaving room for a pregnant wife in the grip of hand-to-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder. To the left of the scene, a woman stands solo, reaching her own rhythm and time, so disconnected from the embrace of those around her. This is a dream because in each face you recognise something of your own creation, and understand that only in paint can you remember the touch of someone no longer with you.

Rego would turn continuously to fairy tales and folklore throughout her life’s work. Inspired by the retellings of Joyce Carol Oats and Angela Carter, her own interpretations of Snow White, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Little Miss Muffet, Mother Goose, are all used emblematically, her art pursuing didactic authority over its viewer to educate them in the corrupted stories of her youth. Many of these figures stem from images of inherited trauma, and show mother, daughter and step-mother relationships in their variant stages; in doing so, she actively challenges the dichotomous presentation of women as either perfect or evil. Rego also engages with images of children left behind by their parents, a common back-story in fairy-tale and myth, that resembles her own childhood experience. In this way, Rego reinscribed the narrative of family for herself, creating with it her own artistic lore.

Peter Pan, 1992

Who are you, boy, invisible to the naked eye? We see you in our sleep, whilst Wendy dreams of strangers and John plants a kiss on your lips. She tugs at her nightdress for you only, the boy with wings and strange fantasies of passing time. May we never grow old, always stay this way, simply free-fall through the weight of it all. Boy, how do you reach the sun? With such waxen hands and cricket limbs, outstretched to Venus like a baby to his mother’s breast. Do you remember the pain of screaming at your birth? Can you talk to women? Do you see routes through the sky when you look at your reflection in the pool? How fast are you boy? Can you move at the speed of lightning? Did you see Armstrong on the moon, or your old man buckle at the knees before his time? Do you believe in magic? In fairies? In the ghosts of your inheritance?

Geppetto Washing Pinocchio, 1996

A huntsman washing his tools for clean blood sport. A doctor examining his patient’s backside. Frankenstein lonely in the mire of his own creation. A pale to dunk an apple head in Holy Water, for now child you are born. May you never tell a lie.

Snow White Swallows the Poisoned Apple, 1995

“Drank too much”, an onlooker says, prodding her muscled calf. “Poisoned,” another winks back.

As I arrived back home after the exhibition, ready to verbally unpack what I had just seen, my flatmate received a phone call from the paternal-side of her family, sharing with her the news that her grandmother had suffered a stroke and would be receiving care in the local hospital of her hometown. We had been talking that very week about the guilt attached to moving away from home, particularly in not being able to see our grandmothers, who both lived alone, having remained stoic through the loss of their husbands. I quickly helped her pack a small bag with a handful of underwear, some warmer clothes to take back north, and a cluster of old books. When she arrived at the hospital she called me to say that although her grandmother was bed-bound, she was still lucid enough to register the words of William Blake, reminding her of the innocence of childhood and the beauty of nature. She also told me that in response, her grandmother requested a poem that she had written as a young girl in primary school. “It was called ‘Stars’”, she remembered of my flatmate’s poem, still touched, even in her old age, by the ancient and tender words of a young girl.

The Barn

Perhaps your most torturous (although perhaps not, remember that one of the woman with her legs being sliced at their opening?). A watermelon rots at the bed, flesh that is carved and cut as much as gnawed at and pulled apart – seeds scattered amongst the dry grass. A great big udder hovers above the head, a small cat nipping each teat for a saucepan of milk, or a bottle-feed experience. The whole chicken watches on: breast, wing, neck and all. As does the hanging doll, the squatting bat, the falling hammer. On the precipice of belief you are mocked, with your skirt in your kickers. Not angels but devils, with whips or sticks or whatever will hurt more than sweet words. Darling, you have been taken to The Barn.

Moments later, my own mother called me to say that she was going into A and E. She assured me that it was for something small, insignificant, a thorn that had become lodged in her hand after she’d used some bracken to steady herself on a walk. “It’s probably just some little thing,” she told me, whilst I knew full well the likelihood of this being true – my mother, heroically tough and determined had once, upon deciding that we needed new carpets, taken to ripping up the existing carpet with her own bare hands, exposing the dusty wood flooring in our living room to the afternoon sun while her skin calloused and splintered. When I later returned her call to see how the appointment had gone, she told me that the doctor had pulled a piece of wood an inch thick from under her skin. I looked down at my palms, wondering how much of my own hands resembled my mothers’.

Untitled No.1, Abortion Series, 1998

Desperate woman, looking for cure. Looking for scalpel to remove all traces of what does not belong, what she did not ask God to send to her stomach. Fevered woman. With face like Sunday, legs that must be held up to stop their buckling, to stop asking such questions. Stolen woman. How this scene was taken from you by white shirts and black leather bags, so that all your hope must now reside in a porcelain cast, in a vessel, in the single painted leaf of a pale pink flower and a man with scissors for fingers. Poster woman. In that costume you play the part of war-effort, of compliance and strength in forearms, and yet your face says ‘we cannot do it’, says more than that. Failed woman. Save your breath for the exhale or the scream.

I kept the little booklet from the exhibition, pinned it to my wall again, in memory. On re-opening it a few weeks later I read a quote of Rego’s where she said: ‘It was very important to go to the origin, the imaginative origin that provides the images of what we have inside us, without us knowing what it is.’ I sat for a while, to think on this.