![\"lizzierug\"](\"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2008\/01\/Lizzie-Borden_display.jpg\")
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Lizzie Borden Hooked Rug<\/p>\n
The mildest, sweetest-looking silver-haired lady in gold-rimmed bifocals is sitting quietly at a booth at a smallish craft fair in an out-of-the-way town. Her name is Evelyn LLoyd, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s selling her hooked rugs, a product you see quite a lot of at these events, subject matter usually rather Grandma Moses-esque – apple trees, pink pigs, charming farm scenes. But at Evelyn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s booth things are a little odd: crows perched among bare branches, sinister black cats, and – most arresting of all – this exceedingly peculiar depiction of New England\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most notorious alleged murderess, Lizzie Borden, the one immortalized in that grisly skip-rope rhyme, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lizzie Borden took an ax\/ And gave her mother forty whacks\/ And when she saw what she had done\/ She gave her father forty-one.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Of course the apparent tone of the piece reads as all in fun: the figure is both childlike in style and bodily proportions. But just look at it for a while. To begin with, note that there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the least attempt at even stylized portraiture here. A quick web search will show you the real Lizzie, a stolid sort fully covered-up in a long-sleeved edwardian gown, hair respectably restrained in a bun – nothing like this bare limbed maenad with pin-wheeling eyes, and hair somehow both wild and closely cropped: the style of one prepped for electroshock or the guillotine.<\/p>\n
Look at that cocked head, that tightlipped little smile, that single crazed eyebrow. Look at the deep maroon shift or smock, not hanging straight as it ought to on a standing figure, but instead weirdly aswirl, and reminiscent in shape both of a gory smear and the blade of an ax. Note the undulating line of grass blades snaking unstably behind the figure\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ankles. And look too at her shoeless feet. They aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really feet at all, are they? Do her legs just end in bones? Or satyr\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hooves perhaps? There is far more fierce energy here then one would expect from a simple joke. Even Lizzie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pose, arms bent at the elbow and upraised, one hand brandishing an ax, is strangely evocative. On first seeing her, I found myself thinking of an ancient Aegean goddess rising from the ruins at Knossos. <\/p>\n
Altogether, her childlike appearance, her connection to a children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rhyme (and that rhyme\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s horrible subject matter), her abbreviated dress, her placement out of doors, her non-human feet, her ritual gesture, and her general aura of unpredictable energy makes this Lizzie seem a representation of a wild freedom, the victory of childhood over adulthood, the mythic over the mundane. But whatever freedom she represents is at least as threatening as it is inviting – she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an ax murderer after all, and the gaze she turns toward us is not merely mischievous but deranged. <\/p>\n
There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still another aspect to this little rug that convinces me it springs from deeper sources than it might first appear, and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the ambiguous positioning of title and signature. Note that directly under the figure you have the label-like block letters \u00e2\u20ac\u0153E L \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc03,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while along the composition\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s edge there is the distinctly signaturish \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lizzie Borden,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a schoolgirl cursive the same coagulated maroon that dyes the dress. Was \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc03 a particularly tumultuous year in the life of the artist? Was she feeling guilt about an impulse to break away from some aspect of her past? Or perhaps anxiety that her own creativity might be a kind of crime, a flight from adult responsibility? Lloyd, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure, would wave away such suggestions. Her Lizzie Borden rug, she told us, was just an idea that came to her one day, something a little different, something that would be fun to make. But to us, that makes this piece that much more fascinating. There is nothing self-conscious or self-important about it. The unsettling quality it has – that sense of strange depths – can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be deliberately manufactured, but is rather a thing now and again called forth when an artist gives herself over to the simple pleasure of creating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Found this on my out and abouts. I like it a lot. Folk art looking image on a rug. Someone make me one! Only $200. From O’Lantern, Longshadow, and McCobb, Ltd. Lizzie Borden Hooked Rug The mildest, sweetest-looking silver-haired lady in gold-rimmed bifocals is sitting quietly at a booth at a smallish craft fair in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7,18,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6-degrees-of-separation","category-borden-buzz","category-lizzie-4-sale","category-lizzie-web-images","category-on-the-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}