[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_01

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 I started reading Virginia Woolf as a teenager, devouring almost all of her writings. I had heard a lot of "A room of one's own" and nothing of good; that’s the reason why, for many years, I had forgotten about it.

Reading it, even if much later, was a revolutionary event that profoundly changed the way I look at myself and judge my work. The theme of the text is the space of women, a leading topic today in gender reflections despite not being much considered until recently.

I had never thought about my space; habit had led me to consider it as typical situations that shouldn't be normal. I used to work in the kitchen, as all the women around me did, unlike men who all had their studios; while my father had his painting room, my grandfather had his workshop, my mother and I stayed in the kitchen,

"It's more comfortable," she used to say, "So we're ready to cook and set the table," but it wasn't comfortable at all, because the space was small for a single person and it was unmanageable for two; every centimeter had to be optimized. Whatever was put on the table soon had to be removed, accumulated in makeshift storage in a corner to then be taken back; this daily moving led me and my mum to think that the work we made was superfluous if not clandestine.

Mum worked with cloth, making shirts and dresses for the family; I did my homework

and drew. The rigor of little space and little time - because the kitchen is where you eat, not where you work, as my grandfather remembered us every day - imposed a hierarchy of actions: it's okay to occupy the table for school homework; duty comes first. But not for the drawing, which risked requiring a piece of the table so large as to impede Mum's tailoring work that was more useful since it gave us the clothes. So I started drawing on tiny pieces of makeshift paper, which were easy to find (scraps or clippings) and quickly disappeared (I hid them inside notebooks when I secretly drew instead of doing homework).

It’s ironic that as I grew up, I was no longer able to draw on large formats or on quality paper. It became a very painful deficit, especially when my colleagues at the Academy of Fine. Artists showed off books made of heavy paper or painted huge canvases. I couldn’t do the same: in front of a large white paper, I felt uncomfortable, out of place, and an impostor. When my supervisor gave me a place in the Atelier, I replied that it was unnecessary because I had just made small drawings.

After reading “A Room of One’s Own,” I stopped blaming myself for this incapacity and I started watching my works with new eyes. Then, I’ve continued to draw on small pieces of low-quality paper but deliberately, because I’ve decided to do it, making a virtue out of a stigma and switching a deficit into a symbol of a more complex condition.