'To know is enough. To know we killed her together. I willed it, he took the blame, but we did it together. One day he'll look me full in the face and he'll sat it. He'll say: You know why it happened. Yes, I'll say, I know. The air will be noise enough, we won't need more words, but he'll say a few because I am a child. We did it because I know the secret. I am the secret.
'If Leaning Towards Infinity explored the relationship between mothers and daughters and the pursuit of mathematics, Painted Woman gives us the tight and tangled knot binding a father and daughter, and the pursuit of art. Death and art, violence and love, possession and yearning; this is the story of the emergence of a woman artist, because of and despite all.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In this article, I examine the Gothic generic, narrative and conceptual strategies Sue Woolfe uses to describe creative emergence from the effects of intergenerational trauma and the impact on modalities of subjectivity in Painted Woman (1990), a tale of incest and disavowed artistry. The deployment of the Gothic subverts expectations of power relations, engenders the development of new paradigmatic writing forms, and shows the presence/lack of agency from within the traumatic space. Woolfe reframes embodied experience through experimentation with assumptions around signifying practices, generates radical language through which to testify to trauma and suggest that from abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential.' (Publication abstract)
