Farm at Watendlath
Room 9, it takes passing through an entire exhibition, then snaking through multiple rooms; sliding across timelines. 1910-1930, walls a soft grey, in the far left corner hangs Carrington’s, Farm at Watendlath.
The landscape is almost swallowed whole by green, hills exhaling luxuriously, tucking away the skies. A cottage sits central, it signals a life being lived: freshly strung laundry on the line to dry. A mother and a daughter look upon the landscape, hand in hand. The gallery label reads: This painting shows a farm near Keswick in the Lake District, where the newly-wed Carrington spent a summer holiday with her husband and their friends. Critics have suggested that the landscape was distorted to reflect the curves of the female body. The two small figures gaze towards the landscape, possibly contemplating their femininity.
The final line of the gallery label frustrated me, as many gallery labels do (they’re often enormously prescriptive, with no room for interpretation or new futures); there is so much more to read into here, Farm at Watendlath is buzzing with political resistance and queer possibility. I wanted to pull out a pen and scribble down everything unsaid: Carrington’s gender identity, her sexuality, her life shared with Lytton and their queer homemaking.
The first picture I saw of Carrington was the frequently reproduced photograph of her in Lady Ottoline’s garden, Carrington as a living sculpture. Perched elegantly, a foot and hand on stone and her body stretched effortlessly in soft and skilful lines, she slips out of her body into nature. Carrington’s disregard for gender norms is evident, gesturing towards androgyny with her short shaggy cropped haircut, clambering onto garden statues in the nude. What would usually be the most personal and private - the naked body - Carrington casts into a public situation.
Photography by Lady Ottoline, Image Source
In this image, there is a shedding of staunch Victorian ideals about femininity, etiquette and manners (the ideal Victorian woman was pure, chaste, refined, and modest). Carrington, simultaneously, releases herself from the clutch of her mother’s desire for the body to be hidden and for women - especially her daughter - to subscribe to their preordained roles.
‘You are very fortunate not to have a head separated from your body’, wrote Carrington, alongside a hurried, humorous self-portrait. The portrait has her hair floating above, dislocated from her body as if sliced off with a clean sweep. Perhaps this quick throwaway sketch captures a spilling of Carrington’s inner conflict and the vexed relationship she had with her body.
Knowledge of the tricky feelings Carrington harboured towards her body - and the female body particularly - brings new meaning to Carrington’s nude paintings.
There’s a rush of horror and alienation, and questions arise as to why Carrington’s nude stands with her face obscured entirely; the gesture of hiding one’s face in one’s hands emanates from the work, the brief comfort of being unidentifiable. But this erasure may signal the presence of shame and bodily anxiety. An anxiety mirrored in photographs of Carrington: her class photograph at Slade, Carrington sits almost-smiling, her arms clumsy at her side. Her pose feels deliberate, ensuring that she cannot be pressed into the mould of normative femininity.
During her time as Slade, she shed the name ‘Dora’, preferring to be known simply as Carrington. She had slipped into her trademark androgynous look: a cropped bob, slack trousers, billowing shirts, shapeless jumpers. Carrington’s time at Slade played an influential role in not only formulating her identity, but developing her confidence in her artistic choices.
Carrington’s rejection of the restrictive, clearly identifiable binary of femininity and masculinity is more intriguing in light of her work and artistic practice, particularly during her time at Slade. Her work was solidly grounded in traditional conventions, fitting neatly with the aesthetic of Slade at that time. Carrington was at a distance from the idea of ‘an artist’; her suburban industrial Bedford upbringing distinguished her unfavourably from her polished, metropolitan Bloomsbury peers. Despite her association with the Bloomsbury group and its members and having a long relationship with Lytton Strachey, she was never a member of the bohemian elite.
The risks of non-conformity were higher. It would be a failure from the margins of recognition, with no chance of being caught within the net of Bloomsbury status. Thus, the consequences of failure were all the more frightening: the possibility of complete erasure as an artist.
Erasure is what art history has attempted to do, something not peculiar to the lives of women artists. Little of Carrington’s work has found recognition and has tended to obscure any objective assessment of her contribution as an artist. There is, however, no shortage of information about her personal life. Morbid curiosity has brought the details and events of Carrington’s life into focus: Carrington has been granted the mythological symbol status as the tragic tomboy of the Bloomsbury Group. Her life and, therefore, her art is defined by her suicide.
It is such a reductive reading of Carrington’s work - to view it as intrinsically linked to tragedy. This view closes off the expansive framework with which her work interacts. Farm at Watendlath is laced with meaning and speaks directly to Carrington’s uneasiness with femininity, its expectations and constraints, and her ambiguous sexuality. The momentous landscape in Farm at Watendlath asserts a continual reminder of our own size in relation to everything else in the image: the sharp contrast between the size of figures and elements of the landscape - trees reaching far above land, hills eclipsing skies; verdant tidal waves. The curvature of the landscape is representative of the anatomy of the ‘female’ body. Envisaged as an overwhelming, great imposition within the world perhaps to mark Carrington’s anxieties visualised.
Painting by Carrington
The figures in the image, set midway along the path and looking upon the landscape, I try to imagine what commentary they would offer as an alternative to what is printed upon gallery labels. Something which would be met with Carrington’s approving nod of the head: her sleek bob shifting momentarily out of place. The landscape reimagines and bends nature into new unrecognisable forms: the hills - characterised by curves, they symbolise the notion of womanhood - standing tall, unwieldy and domineering, smothering the horizon, and making the composition asphyxiating; another glimpse into Carrington’s contempt with the cage of normative femininity.
As I leave Room 9 and out of the gallery, I think of Virginia Woolf’s diary “She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self-consciousness.” Woolf wrote of Carrington, “I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.”. I imagine Woolf writing hurriedly, trying to capture Carrington’s wild, inquisitive presence onto the page, aware that Carrington - as hard as anyone may try - cannot be pinned down or contained.
by Maddie Evans
✿