THE MEDUSA PROJECT

The Medusa Project is a collaborative series of paintings and mini-essays, composed and written by Liza Brenner and Melissa Meade, respectively. Informed by intersectional feminist history, material culture, and the interplay between form and narrative, each set represents one word archetype or slang for women.

Wife in Watercolors

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2020

Oven II

24 x 24 inches
oil on panel
2022

Churchbell

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Fishwife

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2020

The fishwife is loud. She is coarse. She is smelly, foul, greedy, and vulgar. She has a job to do, this female fishmonger, and she shouts above the fray to get it done. You wouldn’t want to push her to the brink.

We don’t hear much of the fish husband, but in Old and Middle English “wife,” simply meant woman, lady, or female, so really, the fishwife was just a woman who sold fish. And this was how the Oxford English Dictionary first defined her, when she first appeared in their 1523 edition. She is an entrepreneur, this fish hag, a business woman, this fish lass, and in the public sphere instead of at home. Tracking the fishwife across history and geography would be an exercise in tracking women’s participation in public life -- in commerce, trade, and economic development. This makes her transgressive, and like many transgressive women, language for her took on a life of its own, becoming a cultural trope that adapted to its context. Scottish, Norwegian, Dutch, Irish, English, and more, fishwife has most often been used as a way to insult women for stepping over boundaries, into masculine territory.

Though there were some deviations over the years of this depiction. For example, Winslow Homer’s late 19th Century (1881-3) paintings stand out as they depict the fishwife as a wife, as hardworking, diligent, and awaiting the return of her fisherman at sea. Dublin’s Molly Malone is the fishwife of song, with a more complicated story. A tragic figure always, in some versions she is chaste and beautiful, selling fish on the streets of Dublin and dying young from cholera; in other versions she sells fish by day and her body by night, still dying young and haunting the city in the afterlife (and spilling out of her dress, as the statue in Dublin captures her).

Melissa Meade, PHD

Gunpowder

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Hedge Creeper

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Lucy Stoner

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Rib

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Sapphist

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2021

Enchantress

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2023

Zoomer

12 x 12 inches
oil on panel
2023

Queen

About the Writer:

Dr. Melissa Meade is Dean of Humanities, Communication, and the Arts at South Puget Sound Community College. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Washington and her B.A. from Purdue University. Before coming to Olympia, she taught communication, media and feminist studies at Colby-Sawyer College and has worked with the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, The Third Wave Fund, and the Feminist Technology Network. Most recently she has presented her work on communication, media and psychoanalysis to the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education and the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study.

Statement:

The Medusa Project unfolded as the global pandemic took root, as the new civil rights movements took shape across the United States, and as climate change effects revealed themselves in the Pacific Northwest in the form of destructive wildfires, unbreathable air, and extreme heat. Initially collaborating through our individual computer screens and now in person in Olympia, Washington, we consider the ways that gender identities, in all their fluidity, weave through these contexts.

Motivated by the complicated lives of women, as well as the complications involved in talking about women, we have landed on a series of words that have animated female identity across history, contexts, and difference. For each word we articulate an image with a mini-essay, attempting to evoke fantasy, liberation, and fissure in our understandings of gender.

Liza works with vintage ephemera, including vintage picture blocks, antique figurines, and fabrics, to create arrangements for painting and digital media. These images are investigations of colors, shapes, textures and lines, an interplay of form and concept. The relationship between language and imagery is meant to be evocative rather than didactic, and exploratory rather than definitive. Melissa writes in response to Liza’s imagery, and Liza adapts her imagery in response to the writing.

CAA 112th Annual Conference Presentation February 2024
Artswalk: Lark, Downtown Olympia, Washington 2023
“Can I Get a Taste of Your Ice Cream: Medusa as intersection of memory and desire.” International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education, Chicago, IL, 2022.
#Woman Online Exhibition, Maryland Federation of Art. Annapolis, Maryland. 2022.
“The Medusa Project,” Creative Something Talk Series, South Puget Sound Community College (online). 2021.
“The Medusa Project.” Faculty and Staff Art Exhibition, Leonor R. Fuller Fine Arts Gallery, South Puget Sound Community College. 2021.

Exhibitions and Presentations