The Smell of Yellow
2026
Artist's Statement
"The Smell of Yellow" is a dance film adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper." The film transports the nineteenth century short story into an ambiguous time period, attempting to root itself in the shared fear, loneliness, and debilitating pain of women experiencing postpartum depression. Beginning soft and romantic, the music and visuals slowly devolve into madness – mirroring the often hidden, yet inwardly desperate outcry caused by the delegitimization of these women’s experiences. The soft, hyperfemininity of the beginning is starkly contrasted by the violently chaotic reality that is revealed midway through the work. The cloaked women themselves, though seemingly terrorizing, are mere manifestations of the self attempting to soothe and care for the woman we are witnessing fall apart. "The Smell of Yellow" relies on a combination of auditory and choreographic storytelling to express a side of motherhood and femininity that is often otherwise unseen.
The script itself was made through the usage of dialogue taken directly from the original short story. I took the two threads that it follows - the narrator's relationship with her husband and her increasing psychotic breakdown - and isolated them to develop each one fully within the film's short time frame. Then, I mixed elements from each to create one larger cohesive narrative. This is why the language itself is more linguistically reminiscent of an older colloquial, yet the ambiguous time period of the visuals ask the viewer to consider the timelessness of the narrator's experience.
Photo Gallery
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Video
London Lack
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