Notes
Escape a Little
Mae Hutchinson
Medium: Collage, watercolor, monoprint, and pen on paper.
Dimensions: (6) 9 x 11 inch pieces.
Public Domain artwork referenced in this piece:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.
Artist Statement
In 2025, we celebrate Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929 and now entering the public domain. Woolf was a master of literature, particularly because she forged a voice as a woman in a literary tradition shaped by and for men. In this extended essay, which she adapted from two of her 1928 lectures, she asserts the necessity for women writers to have autonomy, especially in terms of space and money. Today, it is widely recognized as an essential work of feminist literature.
A Room of One’s Own contains elements of fiction, non-fiction, and essay writing, bending the structures associated with writing and reenvisioning languages of power. Woolf introduces three characters named Mary, each serving a different narrative function, though none are developed as fully distinct individuals. As she explains, “the shape” of writing “has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses.” In response, Woolf took the form into her own hands — distorting and reshaping the written medium itself.
This series of illustrations brings Woolf’s language into conversation with another kind of distortion: the dollhouse. To replicate the domestic environment on a miniature scale is to distort it — to possess and examine the very space that so often possesses us. Comfort, hope, control, hiding, power, labor: the dollhouse becomes a container. A symbol of social expectation and obligation, much of its history is bound to its function as a training tool for the idealized role of women in home settings.
In this work, the dollhouse is hand-drawn, printed, and collaged. Its purpose as a tactile plaything or social tool is stripped away, leaving it as a visual signifier of domesticity. What happens when creative forms like visual art, literature, and theory come together to archive, distort, and reimagine marginalized spaces and lived experiences? Virginia Woolf began breaking free from the constraints of gender and genre. How can we move forward with the lessons she left us about structure, control, and freedom? What is the potential for collective transformation when, as she writes, “we escape a little”?
About the Artist: Mae Hutchinson
Studio Art Program Undergraduate Student, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Mae Hutchinson is an interdisciplinary artist and student at NYU, pursuing a BFA in Studio Art with a minor in Integrated Design Media. Her artistic practice incorporates textile, craft work, printmaking, and ceramics -- mediums that she uses to conceptualize ideas of the home and labor. She works with familiar and utilitarian materials usually from domestic environments, incorporating methods of weaving, sewing, and collage. Slow, repetitive processes and gestures, like hand-building, invite reflection on time, care, and touch. Through these tactile, embodied approaches, she investigates how material traditions can be reimagined beyond traditional frameworks. With her craft work and sculptures, she focuses on the resistance of objects to be functional in standard ways – instead looking to simulate ritual and function in alternate realities or fantastical realms by building objects that can exist in opposition to the common notions of status, value, and gender.
Footnote
To access a digitized version of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf:
Citation:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own / Virginia Woolf. New York (State): Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucbk.ark:/28722/h2j960j8h.