Homage to Frida Kahlo's "Without Hope"
About the Hoop
This 14” round embroidery hoop recreates Frida's haunting painting "Without Hope" (1945), an image which has always both disturbed and intrigued me. I must confess that I never closely examined the items that make up the piled and uncomfortable cornucopia that is on the point of being forced down a huge funnel into Frida's mouth. Working on this hoop let me carefully absorb the details of the "forced feast" (which consists of an array of plucked chicken, roasted turkey, dead fish, roasted pig, several cauliflower-like vegetables, sausage, bloody pelts, and what appears to be a meat slurry). Embroidering this image also revealed the subtle array of colors present in the painting. In fact, the landscape shimmers with cool, subdued purples and blues, Frida's sheet is suffused with pale yellow (a color she always associated with sickness), and the cone itself is sort of sweating, crying, or bleeding drops of color. I endeavored to create similar texture and variety when embroidering the hoop, using French knots to represent the nodules and clusters of fruit and vegetable, trying short stitches to convey the denuded chicken skin with feather barbs still poking out, using longer stitches to give the sense of the draped fur pelt with its bloody underside. One of my favorite details in the embroidery piece is the livid, sequined sun, in which I used sequins with contrasting anchor-beads to try to depict the speckled texture of Frida's painted sun. In a way, to me, the painted sun looks like the yolk of a malevolent egg (which would also tie to Frida's earlier miscarriage, as do some of the "cells" that are scattered across her sheet like planets, looking like sperms and ova).
Scroll down for more images. Available at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift shop.
About the Painting
Frida painted "Without Hope" at a time when she was being force fed. She had lost weight from failed spinal surgeries and was bed-bound, suffering from a severely diminished appetite. Her doctor, Dr. Eloesser, "prescribed her complete bed rest and a forced fattening diet of puréed food every two hours" (fridakahlo.org). Hayden Herrera describes the painting thusly: "Frida lies in bed crying and vomiting or screaming a cornucopia of gore out onto an easel that straddles her bed... The funnel of butchery is topped with a sugar skull that has her name on its forehead. On the back of the canvas [Frida] wrote: 'Not the least hope remains to me. ... Everything moves in tune with what the belly encloses'" (Herrera 187).
I think of this painting as a stark and heartbreaking companion to Frida's "Tree of Hope" image. The latter painting depicts a split landscape of night and day that bursts with color (even if some of it is as raw as a wound), and two Fridas, one of whom has at least rallied to a seated position, holding a flag. However, in "Without Hope" there is only a single Frida--small, naked, prone, trapped under heavy sheets in a barren, volcanic landscape. Frida depicts herself as quite dwarfed in the painting, flattened against the large bed, with the cone looming over her.
I found the descriptions of this painting to be especially vivid: phrases such as "the cornucopia of gore," "the funnel of butchery," and this evocative description on arthistory.org: "A painter’s easel hovers over the artist’s bed. Instead of a canvas it suspends a gristly funnel delivering dead-eyed fish, plucked chicken, bloody shanks of meat and pendulous entrails, directly into Kahlo’s mouth. Instead of a bedroom, the scene is set in a blasted desert, treeless and alien, the sun and moon suspended in silent witness." Hayden Herrera notes, "Frida's sheet is dotted with microscopic organisms, which, by echoing the blood-red sun and the pale moon, extend the drama of Frida's suffering from microcosm to macrocosm" (187).
One of Frida's gifts to the world was her willingness to display her wounds publicly (via her art), in all their horror and beauty. Her paintings channel a dark, grotesque, mythic power and transform it into something vibrant, gorgeous, and profoundly emotionally resonant—while still keeping the root of that darkness intact. I believe that we can all engage these energies in powerful and deeply productive ways.
