I started this painting with a collage: a photo of Mia Wasikowska from Cary Joji Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre” (2011) against a modern landscape. A quote from the novel inspired it:

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.”

By putting Jane Eyre, a character set in the Victorian era, into a modern space, I am exploring how these feelings are still relevant. A city at night alone is a dangerous place for any person, especially a woman. In painting this, I was mindful of Edward Hopper’s work and the way he depicts the dark allure, the melancholy and the loneliness of the city. This painting uses collage to suggest we haven’t changed as people. We still long to be free, and know that it is unfair that we are not. Yet, we also can’t imagine a world where that freedom can be safe. This painting comments on the fear and realisation that we often experience the world through a window.