The Yellow Wallpaper
Incubator is pleased to present The Yellow Wallpaper, an exhibition that brings together twelve artists previously exhibited with Incubator or MAMA, a nomadic platform that showcases the work of women artists. Taking its title from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal 1892 short story, the exhibition explores the interior as a site of paradox: at once confinement and creation, intimacy and estrangement, resistance and release.
In Gilman’s story, a woman is confined to a domestic room “for her own good.” As the wallpaper begins to unravel, so too does the boundary between her inner world and external reality. Her descent into madness becomes a form of escape and reinvention. The interior is not simply the backdrop to her experience, but its expression. Space does not merely hold the self; it reflects, fractures, and ultimately reshapes it.
Across the exhibition, artists approach the interior not as a backdrop, but as subject. Some trace emotion through light and surface. Mary Stephenson’s softly rendered structure appears suspended, like a feeling caught mid-breath, a pink glow seems to hum gently from within. Similarly, Fleur Dempsey’s three paintings - rendered in chalky whites, night blues, and sea greens - unfold as horizontal bands that pulse like quiet emotional frequencies. While Shanti Bell’s glowing sculptures invite quiet encounters. Slightly ajar and warm to the eye, they hold something private, something waiting to unfold. Together, their work evokes the interior as a psychological architecture.
In both Elinor Stanley and Kesewa Aboah’s work, there is a preoccupation with the surface as both barrier and threshold. Stanley’s figure appears as perhaps the same body at different moments - moving toward the edge of the canvas where the paint loosens, becoming more gestural as if the image itself might dissolve. A violet suburban street recedes behind them, already passed through. Kesewa Aboah’s etched metal plate similarly negotiates surface and depth: a face pressed into black-and-white texture, where acid has stripped away areas to reveal a dense, luminous relief. Both artists explore figures caught in moments of emergence or escape, testing the limits of the picture plane. Maayan Sophia Weisstub renders the body itself as an interior space - folding, birthing, repeating - in forms at once grotesque, satirical, and tender.
Elsewhere, the domestic becomes densely inhabited. Lorena Levi’s painting compresses six figures into a single wooden panel, their gazes direct and charged. Suzanne Clements doubles herself in a bathroom mirror, staging interior space as a site of performance, reflection, and fracture. While Florence Reekie’s sumptuously painted rooms - draped, decadent, eerily still - carry traces of lives just slipped out of frame.
A different kind of psychological tension is evident in the work of Xingxin Hu and Anna Rocke. Hu’s painting presents a partial face glimpsed through a stark black lattice. The image is both concealed and exposed, its calm restraint masking a charged undercurrent. Rocke’s emotionally saturated interiors distort the visual language of historic domestic architecture, creating rooms that vibrate with a sense of psychic residue and instability.
The exhibition sits within a wider feminist lineage. From Womanhouse (1972), where artists transformed an abandoned home into a stage for critique, to Women House (2016), which revisited questions of spatial power and gender for a new generation, the interior has long served as a site of both limitation and invention. The Yellow Wallpaper continues this trajectory - not rejecting the interior, but reshaping it. Here, space is not simply occupied; it is animated, haunted, lived-in. Neither rooms nor bodies simply contain. Like the wallpaper in Gilman’s story, they shimmer, flicker, and resist. The walls shift. The self presses forward. And what once held us in may yet lead us out.