Topic #48--"Chair" Entry

A warm welcome to L.M.! Her entry!:

This is a very old work. One in a series I produced while doing my MA in painting at College of Fine Arts, Sydney. It was acquired by The Newcastle Region Art Gallery in 1987 and is called:
"Labyrinth:The heart is a lonely hunter"
233 x 326 cm, synthetic polymer, charcoal, chalk and oilstick on canvas.

It is an abysmal reproduction as I have scanned it from a shot I took of it while it was on show in the Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney and like most student THEN, I could not afford to have slides done.
Anyway, this has been dug out of the vault so that I can enter it in the current Artwords topic...please note the chair in the composition. Also I went to a journal I was keeping at the time and this is what was writte, word for word, which was for my eyes only....here goes.

"Labia labyrinth:the heart is a lonely hunter" ( I obviously lost the word labia when the gallery acquired it)
Bird in a gilded cage comes to mind, the woman trapped by her gender in a dominating maze of neo classical architecture (children's building blocks). Many ways to go, a sense of confusion.

Arrows: -Symbol of direction, in this case pointing every which way
-Also symbol of the prisoner
-Could also be phallic, piercing, wounding...the male wounds> penerates>invades the female.
-To pin down

The Chair: -the male/phallus
-Anchor/stability
-"Sit up straight and be good!" (this was an admonishment of my father)

The child: -Gender destiny
-Responsibility
-Purpose

The curtains: -Concealment
-Domesticity ' a woman's' touch'
-The female...the slightest breeze and they will bend without breaking
-Flexible, accommodating
-Sometimes serving no purpose at all other than to be decorative.

Hmmm.....Yoda says"political animal was I"