Page 3 - Brook catalogue copy P D F

Over the centuries, the subject of Ophelia has been used and interpreted so often by artists and writers that the symbolism of
her in so many incarnations has become quite detached from the original character of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Ophelia floats away from her historical and literary source as easily and as unintentionally as she floats away from her worldly troubles in the original play. It is as though she never drowned, in Shakespeare's watery brook, but instead continues to drift with the endless, ebbing, tides of time.
And so she arrives here, in this contemporary landscape of England's Cotswolds, where I can rediscover a relationship with this most iconic, enigmatic, and unfathomable woman of literary and artistic history.
Elsinore, the castle where Hamlet is set becomes Broadway Tower (where the Pre-Raphaelites spent a summer). The bridge from which Millais painted the best-known painting of Ophelia appears in Too Much of Water, but with Ophelia looking back at the bridge itself, now absent of the artist and his gaze. And in There's Rue for You, the herbs and nettles and flowers that Ophelia was collecting when she fell into the water in Hamlet now reclaim her to the landscape as she reaches out across the picture plane to some aching memory of earlier times.
Ophelia, ever possessed by herself and remote from the artists and poets who continue to seek her soul stays suspended between
two worlds; she belongs nowhere except in a timeless drift. She is nurtured and held by the liquid that surrounds her; washed and watered and cooled and consoled by it, as she drifts endlessly, without limits or edges - the very essence of water itself.