Orpheus' feminine unconscious

Eurydice is in a coffin with portal-windows tucked into a dark crevice of Leeds Art Gallery.



Hers is an underworld configured by skeletal telephone pylons and twisted, gnarled branches of dead trees, at the bottom of an almost-black ocean.



Before entering its depths, Orpheus—dapper in his 50s Hollywood-Hero loose white shirt—open at the neck of course—sings his operatic melancholy to Eurydice from his fog-lined, creaking, Titanic-esque ship at the brink, on the edge, of the underworld.



She hears him through a mourning veil, but is pressed back onto a sea-bed by the faceless figure of death…



What with all the tide/sea/moon imagery and an almost literal evocation of the feminine mystique, this art installation is a French Feminists' idea of heaven... or hell?

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leeds art gallery, feminine mystique, french feminism, eurydice, quay brothers, orpheus