Helen Barchilon Redman
American, b. 1940
Mediatype #80 (Wet n’ Dry), 1979
Collage (magazine clippings on cork board with plastic resin)
Gift of Susan Richards, MA 1974
2018.34.1
We typically consider collage as a modern artistic medium, perhaps identifying its first significant appearance in the early 20th century. However, it feels even more contemporary; collage is often experimented with throughout one’s life, though it is less framed as an artistic outlet within a historical tradition and more as a tool to define and manifest thoughts, hopes and dreams, and likes and dislikes. The clippings used also lend themselves to the feeling of the medium being intimately tied to our contemporary reality. We use materials found in our house, typically newspapers or magazines which catalog current events: politics, celebrity gossip, fashion, advertisements, and horoscopes. Searching for materials in one’s home has been a practice for collaging since at least the 15th century as laid out in A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (1674) where the author suggests collaging to redecorate one’s home.
Between 1975 and 1980, using endless clippings taken from magazines around her house, Helen Barchilon Redman parodied gender roles in mass media creating what she terms mediatypes. Wet n’ Dry (1979) is a parody of women’s socially expected role, housewife. Focusing on cleaning and doing laundry, Redman creates the housewife caricature using images of various textiles, full laundry baskets, cleaning products, and women as her body and dress. Redman makes a monstrous housewife (a bride of Frankenstein) made up of disjointed parts with three hands and four socked feet—the wife had completed so many loads of her husband and children’s laundry she drowned and reemerged, her body and clothes mutating to become one. This ridiculous image encompasses both the seriousness of enforced gender roles and the humor that can come from them. The humorous nature also shines through considering that before arriving at Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections Wet n’ Dry (1979) hung in the donor’s (a Bryn Mawr alumna, MA1974) laundry room. Some may suggest that this placement misses the point of Redman’s critique, but it may be more fruitful to think about the daily life of feminists. They do their laundry, if they have children they may do their laundry, and perhaps sometimes their husband’s. Feminists can rally against mass media’s overrepresentation of women as housewives while completing tasks typically associated with housewives in their own homes.
Visual Description: Mediatype #80 (Wash n’ Dry) (1979) is a collage on thin corkboard, appearing to be composed of magazine clippings with a shiny, plastic resin as a glaze. It is 33.75 x 15.75 x 0.167 in. The clippings are arranged to produce a figure—a woman. The figure’s body parts are disproportionate, her hair and face—waves of textiles and a black and white image of a woman—are close to the life-size, and as one’s eye lowers the figure shrinks. The varied scale in her limbs emphasizes the miscellaneous nature of collage as a medium. The general subject matter of the figure’s anatomy is washcloths, cleaning products, full laundry baskets, a baby’s head, and two women located at the figure’s center. Though altered by light exposure, the work is currently made up of greens, yellows, and blues with accents of pinks and oranges. There is a clear resin glaze applied over the surface of the entire work. The glaze gives a false sense of oneness to the figure.
To place Wet n’ Dry among Redman’s other Mediatypes, look to Redman’s website that chronicles her work: http://www.birthingthecrone.com/pages/mediatypes/index.html
Claire Knight
American, b. 1998
Contextualized Collage #1 (Wetter n’ Dryer) 2020
Digital Collage
Made to be exhibited with Mediatype #80 (Wet n’ Dry) 1979
Initially, I made Wetter n’ Dryer (2020) for my own sake, to try my hand at collage and to imagine Wet n’ Dry (1979) in the context of a home. I often find it difficult to think of works of art outside of the sterile setting of a museum and when I found out Wet n’ Dry (1979) was displayed in a woman’s laundry room, I delighted in the absurdity of such an obvious—and ingenious —placement. Additionally, in a virtual gallery, where you cannot see the work displayed on a wall, it is even harder to imagine the work in the laundry room so I hung it up for you.
I chose to use an image of Mediatype #80 taken before it became discolored from light exposure. Using the work in its original condition informed my choice of vintage wallpaper and washer-and-dryer set. The ultra-70s wallpaper exaggerates the work’s context within 1970s feminism (perhaps the vagina-esque pattern was a Freudian slip) and the washing-and-dryer set are machines seen throughout the late 70s and 80s.
As we all float around our rooms, apartments, or homes during quarantine, reimagine what your old books, magazines, newspapers, or diaries can become, create a collage. If you find those things to be too precious make a digital collage. During a time where decisions are limited, collages offer an outlet for decision making.
