by Charlotte Jansen January 27, 2017

Unnamed Pink Chair

The relationship between women and the home is a complex and storied one; from an early age we’re conditioned to take pride in our surroundings – and yet, the perceived frivolous femininity of home-making has more than a hint of patriarchal suppression about it. In this context, individual objects are elevated to the status of the symbolic – the sensuous attraction of a textile or a lamp becoming intensified and strained. Objects, and our relationship to them, slip quickly into the realm of the uncanny.

This is precisely the tension American photographer Patty Carroll seeks to manipulate in her work. Her ongoing series of Anonymous Women, a collection of several works created over a number of years, is newly published this month in a monograph by Daylight Books. In it, imagined homes become part of their anonymous protagonists’ backdrops, their owners concealed from our view by decorative textiles so as to explore the way women are comforted and constrained by the home, and the material things that make it. Women find solace in Carroll’s domestic scenes, but they’re also suffocated – quite literally suppressed by the upholstery which swathes them.

Read entire article here: Interrogating the Relationship Between Selfhood and Home