“I don’t like to look out of the windows even — there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?”

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

One of the stories that caught my imagination during my English Literature undergraduate degree was “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). It is a gothic tale about a woman’s fall into insanity from the rest cure enforced upon her; it shows how women may be confined under the guise of care, when the true motivation is control. The protagonist becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and the shadow women “creeping” behind it in the room where she is imprisoned.

I felt it was similar to the experience some of us endured during the Covid-19 lockdowns: the mental effect on those who followed the rules against some of the leaders who flaunted them (much like the protagonist’s husband, John.) This painting is my response; it is a modernised depiction of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Depicting a woman alone in her apartment, it is not just about how Covid-19 affected people so deeply. It’s about how a lot of people ended up in their own personal, endless quarantine, when struggling with their mental health.

Quarantine due to exterior circumstances is fractional compared to a quarantine that you’ve involuntarily enforced on yourself because of thoughts and feelings you can’t control. I painted this for people who deal with the isolation that arises from poor mental health, understanding the Covid-19 quarantine was not much different for many.