The Blooming Flowers of Gilead: SCULPTURE
Sculpture Assemblage 2022
In her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood uses flowers as metaphors for women trying to survive in an oppressive, not-so-unimaginable dystopian world. I had the idea of extrapolating the author’s literary device to personify an iris and a tulip to the two groups of women in the story: the barren commanders’ wives and their handmaids forced to bear the commanders’ children.
Project Background: brainstorming different concepts
I wanted to show the sculptures with different bodies and facial expressions: the submissive and hopeless tulip flower with wider hips, hunched over and with tears on her legs in contrast with the iris resigned and complicit, standing lean, straight and taller.
Women of Gilead were banned from reading. Both sculptures are covered in print.
The Iris has fashion magazines clippings, which are banned in Gilead.
The Tulip is wrapped in lines from Genesis 30, the verse from the Bible that is referenced in the novel, “give me children or else I die”.
Tulip petals were made from wrapping sheets of wax and blue fabric around wire.
Iris petals were made from tissue paper.
Iris / commander's wife close-up.
From the fashion magazines, I found an article titled “Man‘s World”.
I also found a small picture of a woman holding and kissing the hand of a man.
The Nooses: Both flowers have a noose around their necks. The iris/commander’s wife’s noose wraps around her body.
She is holding the noose of the tulip/handmaid, symbolizing her part in the oppression of herself and the handmaid.
Garden: the bottles represent vessels or wombs. They are empty, signifying infertility and the kidnapping of the Handmaids’ children.
Tulip detail shows the biblical text from Genesis 30.
On the tulip’s abdomen there is a little tulip inside. Representing the fetus as a tulip signifies both the maternity of the tulip and the fate of a female child of a Handmaid.