Twombly's Wife
Twombly's Wife, 2019
watercolour and hand stitching on fabric, 51 x 47cm
Twombly's Wife is a playful and satirical demonstration of how women's work, specifically handcrafts and domestic work have historically been dismissed and devalued within the art world and in the everyday. The downgrading of work associated with women, domesticity and femininity can be seen as a form of oppression and resulted in the neglect of women artists, and the female existence in general. This neglect is explored in Twombly's Wife through a fictional character who stays under the shadow of her husband. She imitates her husband's gestural line work and his scattered, unruly shapes and marks by stitching them on fabric scraps. While Twombly's cacophony of signs, his confident spontaneity and intense passions evoke freedom and lightness, her needlework suggests a forced/fake attempt to freedom, confidence and spontaneity. Her intricate, restricted, painstaking and premeditated stitching transforms these lines and shapes into the symbols of repression, impotence, control and submission. Her work made with "low" thread (and produced in a domestic context such as a kitchen table) indicates, and makes fun of, a gendered hierarchical division between his highly valued fine art (produced in studios using artistically significant materials) and her traditional/everyday feminine activities and tasks with no artistic or productive value. Not even having her own name, Twombly's Wife represents women whose work and creativity have been belittled, ignored or deliberately suppressed by the male domination.