Extase

Extase is part of the large-scale installation Interim (1984–89). As the overarching series, Interim is divided into four themed-parts to interrogate women’s relationship with different aspects of life: Corpus (body), Pecunia (money), Historia (history) and Potestas (power). These four parts are then divided even further, with each being an interrogation of its theme in relation to feminine subjectivity. Extase, the work within The Women’s Art Collection, is part of Corpus.

Although Corpus is titled after the body, Kelly never actually represents the female form. Instead, she tries to convey women’s consciousness and subjectivity. Extase is named after one of the so-called ‘passionate attitudes’, which the nineteenth-century psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot – a one-time teacher of Freud – used to describe hysterical women. The panels that comprise Extase replicate the scale of bus stop advertisements and have reflective surfaces, meaning that, standing in front of the photographs, the viewer sees themselves reflected in the work. This creates a sense of (perhaps uncomfortable) complicity.

The panels alternate rhythmically between light and dark, image and text. The odd-numbered panels (light) contain screen-printed images of the artist’s clothes in varying states of disarray, such as her embroidered nightie. These images of the clothes reference photographs taken by Charcot of the patient at his hospital for nervous diseases. The even-numbered panels (dark) feature first-person narratives in which anonymous middle-aged women discuss fashion and their experiences as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. In the three years leading up to the project, Mary Kelly kept a notebook – or as she called it, an archive – in which she recorded conversations she had overheard or engaged in with women who were involved in 1970s feminism. The confessional passages in these photographs are based on these conversations and comically mimic the style of women’s magazines.