Category: Arts

An interview with Concordia Art History student Charlotte Koch on her MA thesis research.

On Nov. 29, the Hypothèses conference series hosted their third session of the 2023-2024 season, titled “Femmes modèles et artistes: bodily experience in the painting of Bronzino and Paula Rego,” at La Guilde’s gallery space. The session featured two presentations, including a talk from Concordia MA student Charlotte Koch on her ongoing thesis research, “Hysteric: Femininity and Pain in Paula Rego’s “Possession”.” 

Koch discussed the scope of her project, offering a glimpse into the history of depictions of women’s illnesses and the women who fell prey to exploitation in asylums as early as the 18th century. The plight of these women is remembered through the vivid and dynamic pastel drawings by Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego in her larger-than-life “Possession” series. This series was part of the largest retrospective ever of Rego’s work at London’s Tate Britain art gallery in 2021, only a year before the artist’s passing.

Emma Bell:  What is the ultimate goal of this research? 

Charlotte Koch: What I really want to do is take a closer look at what it means to quote other images and reuse or recycle them into new work. I think work like “Possession” can raise really interesting and important questions about authorship and historical authority, particularly as they relate to ideas we have around the archive or the canon. What I want to do by looking at the history of hysteria is take a more critical look at who has had the power to record the lives and experiences of other people, and how they approached this process.

EB: What inspired you to embark on this project? 

CK: I was very lucky to see Paula Rego’s retrospective in the summer of 2022 right after I finished my undergrad. Originally, I wanted to write about something completely different for my thesis, but after hanging out with Rego’s work for a while, I was so enthralled and my brain was firing in so many different directions, I realized that she would be a great topic for my MA thesis. I knew I wanted to write about historical authorship in some way, and I had, weirdly enough, taken quite a few classes on psychoanalytic theory (my minors in undergrad were philosophy and French studies). It was hard to escape in philosophy, and a lot of French feminist literature from the ‘70s deals a lot with psychoanalysis, so I ran into it a lot then (since that’s what I was most interested in).So when I saw “Possession”, a lot of things clicked for me and I came up with the ideal of approaching historical authorship from a medical/intellectual history perspective. I thought I could put together a really fun, and kind of interdisciplinary thesis that could really utilise all the work I had done in undergrad. 

EB: How do you feel your discussion of the history that informed Rego’s work will impact the way we read media today? 

CK: I hope it can change the way we approach discussions of women’s health as to help take their pain more seriously. A lot of what exists in the archive around hysteria is very trivializing, but in dismissing hysteria outright, you fail to fully see and understand the pain of the women that suffered from it (or suffered from conditions that were labelled as hysteria like PTSD, depression, epilepsy, and more). I think Rego is very good at making the experiences of the women she depicts very confrontational and real. I hope that in highlighting her work and how exactly she accomplishes this, we can gain a new perspective on what it means to treat women’s experiences with the sympathy and severity that they deserve.

EB: How are you practising care as you work on your project?

CK: In my project, I discuss the very difficult lives of three women named Marie, Augustine, and Dora in quite a bit of detail. The only records that exist about them are medical records, and case notes largely only consist of rehashing their traumas. In only focusing on those, the archive continues to enact that same violence on their memory. What I want to avoid is reducing Marie, Augustine, and Dora to their suffering, without dismissing or ignoring their pain either. What I hope I am able to accomplish in my research is to present a balanced, nuanced, sympathetic and careful view of what it is for them to have their lives and stories recorded in this way. The three of them have been reduced to medical cases in the records that exist of them thus far. I hope to create a fuller picture of them as they exist as agents with their own thoughts, feelings, and histories.

EB: What was one of your largest takeaways from presenting at a conference like Hypothèses? How did you feel about the conversation? Was the feedback useful?

CK: It was terrific, and really helpful. What I find most useful when sharing my research is to see what things people latch onto and where they see gaps in logic or information. Conferences like Hypothèses are so great because it lets you test your project. What I learned, for instance, is that there’s a lot more I could say about the actual formal qualities of Rego’s work. I had really neglected my formal analysis of “Possession previously, but after getting some questions and speaking to the folks who attended, I was reminded about how much effect things like scale, perspective, and medium can have on the impact of a work. It let me really zoom out so that I didn’t get lost in my rabbit hole, and now I think my project is a lot more complete.

EB: What scholarship do you recommend for those who want to learn more about your topic?

CK: For folks who are interested in the history of hysteria, Asti Hustvedt’s book Medical Muses can be heart-wrenching at times but is very accessible and paints a beautiful picture of the lives of women who were diagnosed with hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the 1870s.

For folks who are interested in historical authority and history creation, Mark Salber Phillips has two great books on this topic: On Historical Distance and What was History Painting and What is it now? with Jordan Bear. 

I, of course, urge anyone and everyone to check out Paula Rego’s work. Since her Tate retrospective there is thankfully so much more being written about her. She was so prolific, within her massive body of work, you are bound to find something you connect with. Her Dog Women series, I think, is brilliant and a good place to start if you want to dive into her figurative work. And of course, I think Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman should be required reading for everyone who deals with people and archives their research and writing.  It is a short but deeply impactful read that will make you think harder and more carefully about how you write and who you write about.