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Untitled. From the suite of 23 plates entitled 'Blue Rapunzel'
Marran, Elizabeth, born 1951 - Enlarge image
Untitled. From the suite of 23 plates entitled 'Blue Rapunzel'
- Object:
Print
- Place of origin:
USA, USA (made)
- Date:
2003 (printed)
- Artist/Maker:
Marran, Elizabeth, born 1951 (artist)
- Materials and Techniques:
Digital print
- Credit Line:
Given by the artist
- Museum number:
E.340-2007
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case MP, shelf 73
This image is one of a series in which the artist plays with the fairy story of Rapunzel, a young woman who was shut away in a tower and whose only means of contact with the outside world was through her long hair which she let out of the window like a rope for her lover to climb up and reach her. For Marran 'Rapunzel' suggests a realm which is simultaneously idealised, fantastical, chaotic and quite depressing, in which women are cut off from the wider world through the demands of child- and home- care. The imagery, which suggests a contemporary Japanese aesthetic of the kind found in comic books, toys and video games, combines the abstract with vague evocations of children's toys and domestic objects. The writer Diana Gaston describes Elizabeth Marran's ability to "reveal the potential of a circle or an oval to become something much more fantastic. She assembles circular forms in a regular pattern, only to disrupt them, seemingly through some kind of mathematical formula, setting up slight disruptions or fractiousness among otherwise playful shapes." The reference to 'blue' in the title may reflect the dominance of the colour in the series which, as Gaston also points out, "vacillates between despair and transcendence."
