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One of the most interesting pieces, I think, was the Marriage Bed, which started off as
a little bed; I picked up a little, like a model bed in an antique shop and I put the
roses and nails in it. I wanted to show the conflict that men and women have in marriage,
and that it's not always a bed of roses. And so I did that. And then later on, I made the
large one, which is in the Museum. And that was really exciting. It's quite a different
thing. The large one has an impact, because, well, it's a full size bed, and the roses
are giant, and it's more dramatic.
The other, when you see a little one, it's-you get the idea, but you don't get the sort of
full blast of the impact, the visual impact that you get with the big piece. I think with
this piece, as with many things I do, I like to juxtapose. This is a sort of juxtapositioning:
of the soft and the hard, the harsh, the cruel and the happy, the sad and the happy, and
all these things that are-one plays against the other.
I think the conflict between man and woman in a marriage -- I mean, that sometimes marriage
is really happy, which you hope it will be; but sometimes it's a prison. And I think especially
in marriage, the bed can be, for some people, a pure delight, and sometimes it can be something
that's a duty or even forced upon you. And I think it's an ever-continuing, interesting
subject.
Well, I think in marriage, certainly, it's getting better, I think; but it used to be
the case that a woman was identified by who she was married to. If she was married to
somebody, you know, she was the banker's wife, or she was the baker's wife or something.
And she didn't have an identity of her own, and now she is more able to. But I still think
that a woman often puts up with a lot more in a marriage, and even though now most women
work in some form or another, when they've done their work, they still -- more of them
go home and do the work again when they get home.