"There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

At night in any kind of light,,...,it becomes bars!. The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind is as plain as can be.

By day she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour." ^[1]

It describes the "residual spaces" in traditional architecture formed within the gap between internal structure and external ornament which are neither one nor the other: "These structural ornamental elements are sometimes vestigial (almost in a two-dimensional pattern) but they give the effect of actually detached spatial layers."^[2]

"... Belinda Ellis and Kate Upton have been involved in a complex and intricate exploration of the links between historical notions of ornament and gender relations. Traditionally, architecture has often been theorised in masculinist terms of static, enduring structures and rational form which casts off the feminine ephemera of decorative excess, or at least puts it in its place. Ellis and Upton dissect and graphically fray the structural and textural rhetoric's of the discipline to reveal the primacy of the decorative, the mobile and the textural.

They did this in the show with a series of shallow box-reliefs which operated as maquettes for an architectural reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's nineteenth-century novella The Yellow Wallpaper. The narrator in Gilman's book suffers the oppressive and imprisoning effects of a heavily-patterned wallpaper, which works as a signifier for the claustrophobic monitoring that her husband maintains on her in her role as frail wife and mother." ^[3]

The Room; the bedroom, that space of confinement. Drawn in perspective, an unreal system of viewing. Setting the room up as an object to be viewed, as the woman is set up as object within her prison walls, her femininity prescribed by systems of vision, and a controlling gaze. Set up by drawn threads, from the embroidery/tapestry/wallpaper. Scratchings and rubbings, obsessive behaviours or disorders; working at the ornament, disfiguring and destroying it. Attempting to remove the spot, the Maculae, the imperfection of madness, to cure the condition.

The Garden; exterior but at the same time Nature and feminine, inextricably associated with a definition of femininity from Elizabethan times when the terms "to embroider" and "to flower" were interchangeable. From their association with embroidery and tapestry and therefore wallpaper Nature and woman are linked. Leisured embroidery signified the availability (for marriage) of a woman. Women transferred the beauties of nature to their dress, embroidery becoming associated with the 'seductive nature of the female'. Justine Clark writes "So to draw on seduction might be to find a way to scribble on architecture, to modify its surface, to displace the discourse."^[4]

Is the garden elevation or plan? plan or pattern?. A pattern for reproduction, embroiding. Removed from the divine hand of the artist to the realm of the domestic, the image or wallpaper becomes a commodity in the exchange of everyday life.

The Wall; that architectural device that defines as well as constitutes what is exterior and interior. Wall as surface and site. Site of ornament but innately entwined with structure. A division between interior and exterior whose distinction is blurred when both are seen as constructs of a male discourse of history. The blur is the gap, the wall an architecture?? of the gap.

The wallpaper/ornament gains authority as the structure of the wall/architecture. The feminine structure of authority.

Kate Upton 1995.