Natasha Walsh
Dear Frida (The Red Dress), 2018
oil on copper
40.5 x 35.5 cm / 51.5 x 58.5cm (framed)
Winner – 2018 Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship
Winner – 2018 Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship
Dear Frida, One of the first pieces I saw by you was ‘Self portrait with cropped hair’ (1940). I felt an immediate kinship. I personally understand the liberation of shaving...
Dear Frida,
One of the first pieces I saw by you was ‘Self portrait with cropped hair’ (1940). I felt an immediate kinship. I personally understand the liberation of shaving off a long heavy mane of hair which has come to signify something else, something weightier than hair. A living memory. The hair that grew when this or that occurred, tying the past to the present so that we carry that memory with us.
I have shorn off my own hair at various points in my life. It has always been a rejection of something indescribable. First when I was 6 with a pair of scissors to the bemusement and horror of my parents, then at 16 to the shock of my peers and then again at 21 to the regret of my friend. Shortly after the last, I remember a little boy tugging on his father’s sleeve to ask in a boisterous voice ‘Why does that girl look like a boy’ to his fathers mortification and my own bemusement. It signified an intention to reject the limiting expectations of others, to signify independence from the assumptions placed on our sex. If short hair signified femaleness, in our different cultures, perhaps the rejection would be to grow it?
I made this painting on copper for you. It inverts your ‘Self portrait with cropped hair’. While both your representation and my own sit in straight backed chairs on a kind of stage, your masculine guise is in my painting inverted to a feminine one. Your long hair is freshly cropped and strewn about you on the floor. I imagined my own hair, in reality about an inch in length at the time of this painting, long and heavy down my back once again. My costume is a heavy red dress that confines movement. The red of the dress and my copper support, which shines through, Immediately attracts the eye. This colour represents womanhood. The physiologically inescapable recurrent reminder of our sex, that comes around like the moon in its cycles. I’ve placed myself on this stage, uncomfortable within this inherited gendered role, to pose a question…. Dear Frida, what has changed?
I don’t refer specifically to the time after your divorce from Diego, which I understand inspired you to crop your hair and make this painting. I’m asking instead, what changes when we wear these different costumes? When we perform a different role by fitting ourselves into a different box for others to define us by. Our hair always grows back, along with the assumptions and judgments of others after all.
Reading the lyrics to the famous Mexican song which you have inscribed at the top of your composition, ‘Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.’ I imagine you might say ‘I clearly do not care’.
Yours truly,
Natasha Walsh
One of the first pieces I saw by you was ‘Self portrait with cropped hair’ (1940). I felt an immediate kinship. I personally understand the liberation of shaving off a long heavy mane of hair which has come to signify something else, something weightier than hair. A living memory. The hair that grew when this or that occurred, tying the past to the present so that we carry that memory with us.
I have shorn off my own hair at various points in my life. It has always been a rejection of something indescribable. First when I was 6 with a pair of scissors to the bemusement and horror of my parents, then at 16 to the shock of my peers and then again at 21 to the regret of my friend. Shortly after the last, I remember a little boy tugging on his father’s sleeve to ask in a boisterous voice ‘Why does that girl look like a boy’ to his fathers mortification and my own bemusement. It signified an intention to reject the limiting expectations of others, to signify independence from the assumptions placed on our sex. If short hair signified femaleness, in our different cultures, perhaps the rejection would be to grow it?
I made this painting on copper for you. It inverts your ‘Self portrait with cropped hair’. While both your representation and my own sit in straight backed chairs on a kind of stage, your masculine guise is in my painting inverted to a feminine one. Your long hair is freshly cropped and strewn about you on the floor. I imagined my own hair, in reality about an inch in length at the time of this painting, long and heavy down my back once again. My costume is a heavy red dress that confines movement. The red of the dress and my copper support, which shines through, Immediately attracts the eye. This colour represents womanhood. The physiologically inescapable recurrent reminder of our sex, that comes around like the moon in its cycles. I’ve placed myself on this stage, uncomfortable within this inherited gendered role, to pose a question…. Dear Frida, what has changed?
I don’t refer specifically to the time after your divorce from Diego, which I understand inspired you to crop your hair and make this painting. I’m asking instead, what changes when we wear these different costumes? When we perform a different role by fitting ourselves into a different box for others to define us by. Our hair always grows back, along with the assumptions and judgments of others after all.
Reading the lyrics to the famous Mexican song which you have inscribed at the top of your composition, ‘Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.’ I imagine you might say ‘I clearly do not care’.
Yours truly,
Natasha Walsh