The Yellow Wallpaper
Advanced Scenic Design with Sara Ryung Clement Spring 2025
Room Project
Project Brief: Choose a text or piece of music with a sense of environment or space and a character or specific set of circumstances. Using the text to inform design choices, draft and create a 1/2” scale model of the room the text refers to.
I chose “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped offthe paper - in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.”
I took some artistic liberties with the text, and aimed to create a sense of confinement with the room.