Abstract

Alison Hendrix, one of the clone-sisters central to the TV series Orphan Black, is frequently seen in her craft room, a highly organized and regimented space straight out of a Martha Stewart magazine. In this space she creates floral arrangements hiding guns and pills, fancy boxes of soap concealing illegal drugs, a chart of the nefarious business connections of the Dyad Institute decorated with computer clip art and frilly frames. This is the expected craft room of the suburban soccer mom; a thin veneer over her desperation and moral failings, for it is also the room where she tortures her husband Donnie. In the final episodes of the fifth season, she transforms both her physical appearance and the focus of her artistic expression. This essay will note parallels between her artistic evolution and that of her clone-sister Sarah’s adopted brother Felix, whose studio art develops in new directions by the end of the series, and clone-sister Helena, whose ritualistic drawings, shamanic constructions, and illustrated memoir are never presented as formal art or craft but serve the same purpose of self-expression, emotional channeling, and community bonding.

KEYWORDS: Orphan Black, art, craft, gender in art and craft, cloning, stencilling, art as communication

Introduction

Tatiana Maslany as Sarah Manning, Alison Hendrix, Cosima Niehaus, Rachel Duncan, and Helena.

Representations of art and craft are essential to several major character arcs and subplots of the series.  These representations demonstrate the development and evolution of multiple characters and their relationships with the world, underline the show’s concern with the competing effects of nature and nurture on the skills and life-paths the clones pursue, and emphasize the strengths they gain from communication with and connection to each other. ^[1] At a meta-level, depicting a character engaged in art practice is an excellent way to show — rather than tell — important information, including the characters’ coming to greater mutual understanding of each other’s emotions, history, and psychological concerns. Art practices of the characters in Orphan Black may variously demonstrate: an overwhelming need to fit into a societally determined role, existential discomfort with the very concept of cloning, the search for biological family, personal guilt and spiritual growth, developmental phases of childhood, recovery from trauma, overt and covert communication, family and community healing, or the achievement of mental balance and joy in life. This essay will explore several of these functions of art for three of the main characters.

One potentially problematic aspect of some ways the show represents art practice is its gender alignment of art with higher value and a male practitioner, and craft with lower value and a female practitioner.  Certain areas of craft, particularly fiber crafts, have long been devalued on the basis of gender association; Auther (2010), for example, discusses “prejudices against fiber” due to “historical associations to the ‘decorative,’ ‘craft,’ or ‘women’s work’” (p.xii). Fiber art has long been dismissed because of its utilitarian or decorative nature; it does not partake of “the heroic struggle between the artist and the blank canvas” (Greenberg qtd. in Auther, 2010, p.xvi) and is not designed solely for “disinterested, hands-off contemplation” but also appeals to touch and handling (Mays qtd. in Auther, 2010, p.xviii). An uncritical use of this stereotypical distinction could easily be read as undermining the centrally important struggle of the young women against the gender structures of society and of Dyad’s female cloning project.

However, there is a certain intersectionality at play here in the fact that the male artist is gay, and respect is shown to the female crafter as she discovers a medium better suited to her talents and starts to mature as an artist. Additionally, her craft activities are never shown as something she feels driven to do so that she can express her inner self or experience artistic satisfaction; they serve more to align her with social expectations within her community and class, and give her a means to measure and position herself vis à vis her mother and other women in her social circle. Her craft work is definitively not what Fisk (2012) describes as a practice of spiritual expression and discourse, a way of relating to the world, being at home in the world, and creating meaning in the everyday. So when she ultimately rejects “craftiness” in the search for truly meaningful personal expression, it is not as much of a value judgment against female-identified “craft” as it might seem. What we are seeing rejected is not craft that borders on or challenges definitions of art (Auther, 2010), or craft seriously pursued, but “being crafty” as a means for a stay-at-home mom to occupy her time and signal her virtue, and her accompanying feeling of a life lived uselessly and pointlessly.^[2]

What Happens in Alison’s Room: “I’m always different”

Alison Hendrix (Tatiana Maslany), the crafter referred to above, is one of the first clone-sisters we meet and remains central to the story until the very end. Alison appears to be a typical suburban housewife; she lives in a large and well-appointed house in a densely-packed suburban housing development near Toronto with her husband and their two adopted children. Bailey Downs is the town where she grew up and where her mother still lives and runs a bath and beauty product store. Alison is deeply involved in her community: active in coaching children’s sports, community theatre, local politics, and her church.

Alison is frequently seen in her craft room, a highly organized and regimented space straight out of a Martha Stewart magazine. This is the expected craft room of the stereotypical suburban soccer mom, but in going through the episodes one by one, we discover that she is rarely shown actually crafting in this space.   More frequently, she folds laundry there, has clandestine meetings with the “clone club” by webcam or in person, or manages and organizes her family’s lives. The constrained Instagram-perfect tidiness of Alison’s craft room is a thin veneer over her desperation and moral failings; it is the scene of tense confrontations, self-medication, and secrecy, the room where she hides her pills, booze, and guns. Others are discouraged from using this room or her supplies; we never see her children crafting with her (though their art is displayed on a bulletin board), and at one point fellow clone Helena makes it clear that she has been forbidden to work in this room because of the chaos she creates in Alison’s “system” (“Transgressive Border Crossing” [Cochrane & Fawcett, 2016], “From Instinct to Rational Control” [Levine & Stebbings, 2016]). This is in contrast with another central clone character, Sarah Manning, who, though not artistically talented herself, is shown spending unstructured time coloring, painting, and doing various paper crafts with her daughter Kira. ^[3]

Examples of some of the craft products we do see come out of this room are two floral arrangements, one hiding a gun (in “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” [Manson & Fawcett, 2014a]) and the other pills and a false urine sample (“The Collapse of Nature” [Manson and Fawcett, 2016a]), both complete with hand-made glitter-embellished cards (“These are SO Alison,” as another character says of one of these arrangements [Manson & Fawcett, 2014a]). Also notable are fancy boxes of soap concealing illegal drugs, and a flowchart of the nefarious business connections of the Dyad Institute, decorated with computer clip art against a pink ticking-stripe background. This room is a place where both dirty laundry and secrets are cleaned up and smoothed out and tidied away neatly in boxes and bins.

Our first look at the craft room is in the second episode of the first season, and tellingly, Alison is not crafting; she is clipping coupons and filing them in a loose-leaf binder (“Instinct” [Manson & Fawcett, 2013a]). In a scene set a short time later, where she and fellow clones Cosima and Sarah meet in person, she retreats from the family room into her craft room when upset (“Variation Under Nature” [Manson & Frazee, 2013]). In “Effects of External Conditions” (Manson & Fawcett, 2013b), while standing by in case Sarah needs backup, we see her set yarn, a gun, car keys, and a “clone phone” on the table (“clone phones” are untraceable burner phones the “Clone Club” uses for communication); a completed pair of mittens indicates the passage of time in a later scene.

One of the most important scenes set in this room occurs in episode 1.6 (“Variations Under Domestication” [Pascoe & Fawcett, 2013]). As Staci Stutsman (2016) observes, Alison’s “craft room serves as one of the more interesting indicators of her repressed unruliness. At first, it operates as a clear signifier of Alison’s obsessive need to order her life,” but in this episode, “this craft room and Alison’s props within it begin to signify her anger” (p.91). More and more paranoid about the identity of her ‘monitor,’ the person assigned by the Dyad Institute to observe and report on each clone, she knocks her husband Donnie (Kristian Bruun) unconscious with one of his own golf clubs and ties him to a chair in the craft room using yarn, tape, and other craft supplies. Not taking her threats seriously at first, he says “what—you’re going to stick sequins on me?” but he soon finds out exactly how painful hot glue dripped on bare skin can be. “As Alison presses Donnie for information, she menacingly twirls a caddy of scissors around, rendering the tools of domesticity into instruments of terror. While the scissors imply violence, they also offer a moment of parodic commentary on Alison’s ‘perfect world,’ forcing viewers to ask why would one person need more than a dozen pairs of craft scissors?”  (Bell, 2019, p.53). Here “Alison uses the very props that signify her repression [to reveal] her unruliness. Whereas the props originally implied Alison’s repression, they transform into literal enactments of her latent desires” (Stutsman, 2016, p.92).

Another of her craft projects is involved in a later act of violence. When Alison turns her attention to neighbor Aynsley (Natalie Lisinska) as a possible monitor, a fight leads to Aynsley stuffing a Christmas angel Alison made for her down her garbage disposal. As Aynsley’s scarf becomes entangled with the doll, she strangles to death while Alison looks on (“Endless Forms Most Beautiful” [Manson & Fawcett, 2013c]).

Thematically interwoven with this ambivalent imagery about craft is the truth about where Alison’s real artistic talents and interests lie: in music, theatre, and musical theatre in particular. Very early, in 1.4 (“Effects of External Conditions” [Manson & Fawcett, 2013b]), Alison reveals her pride in her acting to Felix as he coaches her to impersonate Sarah, and in the early episodes of season 2 we watch her rehearse for, and take the lead role in, a musical entitled Blood Ties. But her meltdown in 2.3 (“Mingling Its Own Nature With It” [Levine & Scott, 2014]) results in a fall from the stage and a stay in rehab—where she also does crafts, embellishing nametags for family day and knitting nine-fingered gloves for fellow inmate Vic.

It is in season 3 that Alison and Donnie, now firmly partners in crime, come up with the idea to finance her run for a seat on the school board by becoming drug dealers, first hiding drugs in the fancy packages of home-made soap they hand out to potential supporters, and then buying out her mother’s store, Bubbles, as a front for larger-scale operations. The soap store gives us a vital clue to Alison’s character: her mother is revealed to be a passive-aggressive yet domineering personality for whom Alison has always been a disappointment, and the aesthetic of Bubbles—Barbie-pink, bedazzled, uber-feminine, glittery and frilly, even the products for men fragranced with feminine mint—is the aesthetic that has clearly dominated Alison’s attempts at self-expression. Her confrontation with her mother, who subsequently retires to Florida, helps create a space for Alison to assert her own personality.

In season 4, as the drug dealing sideline spirals out of control and events get more serious in the clone conspiracy, we begin to see more sincere and heartfelt expressions of Alison’s own artistic self. For example, when Kendall Malone is killed, Alison sends a simple, straightforward floral arrangement and a handwritten note to Kendall’s daughter Siobhan (Maria Doyle Kennedy)—no hidden agenda, no glitter, just honest sympathy (“The Antisocialism of Sex” [Troubetzkoy, Manson, & Frazee, 2016]). And when she is anxiously awaiting news about a death threat against Donnie during a rehearsal for Jesus Christ Superstar, her relief at his reprieve triggers her to truly open up and belt out her part (Judas Iscariot) with heartfelt emotion (“The Redesign of Natural Objects” [Mohan & Morton, 2016]).

The climax of Alison’s character arc begins in episode 5.3 (“Beneath Her Heart” [Levine & Wellington, 2017]). At the end of this Alison-focused episode, where a series of flashbacks are intercut with scenes of her attending an online wake after the violent death of yet another clone-sister, falling off the wagon, facing serious challenges to her pride and self-image, and finally confronting Dyad-aligned clone Rachel in person, she resolves that she has to “go away for a while.” “You mean like a yoga retreat?” Donnie asks, but her idea is something much more free-form and unplanned. Together they sing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” before she disappears for three episodes.

Alison returns in “Gag or Throttle” (St. Cyr & Frazee, 2017) with an entirely new look, no longer slavishly conforming to the Bailey Downs aesthetic or to her mother’s expectations—her hair is cut short and has purple streaks, her clothes are flowing and floral rather than buttoned-up preppy or athletic, she wears chunky jewelry and she has gotten a tattoo saying “Live Deep.” She’s gone on a Jungian retreat in Mendocino, learned about individuation and her shadow-self, and is intent on pursuing a life that is as “creative and free” as her new hairdo (DeCandido 140). For Alison, rejecting the uniformity and the surveillance culture of Bailey Downs is in essence also a rejection of the intended sameness of the clones; she claims her individuality in spirit, and the tattoo is a permanent marker of individuation of her body as well.^[4]

She packs most of the contents of her craft room to donate to charity with Donnie’s assistance (he winces as the glue gun goes into the bag), saying:

ALISON: I am DONE with crafts. […] The point of art is to lose control, Donnie. To reveal your inner chaos. I’m uncovering my shadow self. […]. The things, subconscious desires that aren’t necessarily good. [If kept in the dark] then they manifest in behavior. In my drinking, in my need to control everything. […] Drinking is the effect of the unexplored shadow self. (St. Cyr & Frazee, 2017)

On the cleared-off craft room table, she places an electronic keyboard and plugs it in, nodding in satisfaction as she plays a phrase. In the final episode, we see this space transformed into a music room; there are music posters on the walls, Alison is composing on the keyboard, and notably there is also a drum set and a second music stand for a partner. Donnie enters the room and begins a strip-tease to the music and Alison responds by changing the tempo; music has become a means for them to share and create together.

Gallerie Rimbaud: “It’s my process and you have no influence on it”

Felix Dawkins (Jordan Gavaris) is the adopted foster brother of our central viewpoint character for the series, clone Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany). He is an artist (and occasional rent-boy and petty criminal) who lives and works in a loft in a seedy section of downtown Toronto. Before the events of the television series, he is known to have had a gallery show titled Visions of Judgment featuring collages, some of which can still be seen in his loft (DeCandido, 2017, p.36), and he claims to have dabbled in performance art (“The Collapse of Nature” [Manson & Fawcett, 2016a]). His educational background in the arts is not revealed, but Fee exhibits mastery of multiple techniques, is serious about his work, and wants it to “[make] people think” (DeCandido, 2017, p.36).

His studio at the beginning of the series is undisciplined, a bit of a rat’s nest. Felix needs loud music (usually opera) and alcohol to create, and is frequently seen painting while wearing nothing more than an apron and boots. The art we see at this stage is wild, raw, and unpolished, large-scale, slashed with color, overtly sexual, and often disturbing.  One piece we see in progress is a large painting of Sarah, surrounded by flames (that read in some lights as a halo), embellished with an erect penis and a banner reading “In Loving Memory” and with its eyes heavily crossed out in black. He paints clones Cosima and Alison as he meets them as well; Cosima, the scientist and lesbian, is strongly sexualized and shown wearing a lab coat open over a black bra, while beakers foam and overflow in front of her; Alison’s portrait features her surrounded by a mandorla or full-body halo like the Virgin of Guadalupe, cradling a soccer ball and a wine bottle, with a minivan and a gun with wings floating in the background. This portrait work is almost masturbatory—painting in the nude emphasizes this—as he is essentially painting his reactions to the people he portrays, not revealing anything in particular about their inner qualities, and we don’t see any of the three women sitting for this triptych.^[5] They are all posed much the same: face-on to the viewer, shown from about the waist up and surrounded in some sort of symbolic frame: a visual echo of cloning that expresses Felix’s inner disquiet with both the concept and the conspiracy he’s being pulled into.

Felix is highly conscious of his own need to translate his emotions into art. When he learns of Dyad agent Daniel’s death at the hands of clone Helena while a terrified Sarah, tied up in the shower, looks on, his reaction is, “You do realize I’m going to have to paint this in order to come to terms with it?” (“Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est” [Elliott & Shaver, 2014]).  An evocative portrait of Helena in her torn wedding gown from this scene, surrounded by imagery of her own naïve artistic expression (of which more below) on a blood-red background, is the eventual result. In the next episode we see him painting in a rage in reaction to an attempt to frame him for murder—loud heavy metal music playing (not his usual opera), drinking straight from the bottle, flinging and hurling paint at a large canvas (“To Hound Nature in Her Wanderings” [Roberts & Sullivan, 2014]).

Season 3 shows Felix at work on several different projects, including a piece with two identical headless male torsos facing each other (a reference to the Castor group of male clones so central to this season, as well as his own homosexuality) and a self-portrait. Felix’s ability to work in many media is referenced to comic effect when he tries to explain away a puddle of blood on the floor as “a new project. Really fresh” (“Formalized, Complex, and Costly” [Roberts & Fawcett, 2015]).

In season 4, Felix takes a new direction in both his life and his art. The complicated family connections of the Leda and Castor clones and their genetic original have brought his own biologically orphaned state home to him, and he begins a search for his blood family, finally finding a surviving step-sister, Adele (Lauren Hammersley). He has also set his portrait painting aside and taken up stenciling—again, frequently in the nude with opera music blaring at high volume. The stencils are a mix: pictorial stencils like a flying rocket-winged phallus, a postage stamp, and a self-portrait; phrases and sayings like “No gods no parents,” “I Miss RentBoy,” and “Be Fucking Gay.” This work is far more directly autobiographical than anything we have seen before. Overlaying and behind it all, layer after layer of hard-edged, precise, carefully-aligned repetitive patterns evoke craft stenciling for home décor. We may on the one hand see here a strong craft influence from his sympathetic association with Alison, married to the punk/urban aesthetic of graffiti that pervades the studio’s neighborhood. But while the essential craft-iness of stenciling evokes Alison, it also references the cloning process: endless repetition without variation, a sort of sterile fecundity without end. Felix deals with his sense of displacement and unease both overtly, through his genealogical quest, and more indirectly through his art.

As the season progresses, nearly every wall surface in the loft is covered with overlapping layers of stencils. The stenciled phrases, while somewhat ambiguous, communicate directly to the reader, and the inclusion of the self-portrait underlines the relationship of this artistic phase to his personal search for family and meaning and his coming to terms with cloning, what he calls “a profound moment for me” (“The Stigmata of Progress” [Nelson & Girotti, 2016]). His friends pay attention to his artistic development; Alison observes “Well, it’s really coming along, this thing” (“Transgressive Border Crossing” [Cochrane & Fawcett, 2016]), little Kira (Skyler Wexler) asks “Did you paint all this?” and particularly notices the rocket/phallus (“Human Raw Material” [Melville & Wellington, 2016]), and police detective Art Bell (Kevin Hanchard) comments “I have to say, this is some of your finest work, Felix” as he adds the finishing touch: a stencil of four of the clone-sisters, a recursive copying of copies (“From Dancing Mice to Psychopaths” [Manson & Fawcett, 2016b]).

Felix’s art in season 5 shows the success of this ‘coming to terms,’ as we see Felix interacting personally with sitting subjects as he works on their portraits and plans for a gallery opening. On a day when Sarah has to stay hidden at the loft, Fee decides to “do something constructive” with the time and begin a painting of her. “Why do you insist on painting naked?” she complains, and he replies airily “It’s my process and you have no influence on it,” a comment on their teasing brother-sister relationship as much as his artistic rituals. He begins this portrait by applying gobs of paint directly to the canvas with his bare hands (“Beneath Her Heart” [Levine & Wellington, 2017]). In the next episode, he keeps his clothes on while working on a pencil sketch of Sarah’s daughter Kira; she comments on how much he’s made her look like her mom, a conscious choice as Felix notes her growing maturity (“Let the Children and Childbearers Toil” [Nelson & Wellington, 2017]). Other sittings are not shown but implied.

The art opening is wildly successful. The gallery is utterly transformed; we discover that the stenciling on the walls was just practice for the final autobiographical piece on the sliding door, and everything else has been painted over in flat white. The furniture has been removed and each portrait lit with a single lamp. When we see them in a slow pan shot around the gallery, it’s clear that Felix has turned back outwards from his self-regarding phase and is now painting his muse in all her different forms, as he announces to the crowd (“Guillotines Decide” [Porter-Christie, Manson, & Morton, 2017]).

Jordan Gavaris, the actor who portrays Felix, commented (2017) that the canvases provided by the art department were “all so perfect—all so character oriented. Even the color palettes for each character.” The paintings of the clone-sisters are in a variety of techniques: for example, the dual portrait of M.K., with and without her mask, harks back to his earlier collage work, while Beth’s face is abstracted to a stencil. Krystal’s portrait is comic-book influenced, and icy villain Rachel is represented by a fashion illustration-like line drawing on linoleum, displayed on the floor as a dance surface. Siobhan’s portrait-with-gun is practically photo-realistic and Kira is surrounded by her signature origami butterfly/angels in 3-D. In each, the technique used and the symbols incorporated help to communicate the character of the sitter to the viewer: not just what they mean to Felix, but what they are or were in the world, for good and for ill. They are not all feel-good portraits by any means, but capture and communicate an essence. Notably, the poses are also now all as different as the media and styles, unlike the season 1 triptych—Felix is painting the women as individuals now, not as existentially disturbing copies of his sister.

What makes the art show truly soar is the incorporation of performance art; in a series of clone swaps, Felix introduces Alison, Cosima, and Sarah, who speak and dance in representation of the goddesses with whom Felix identifies them: respectively, Hestia, goddess of the hearth, Metis, goddess of wisdom, and Athena, goddess of war. To the casual party attendee, these are all the same woman in different costumes; those in the know, know better, and see a deeper celebration of diversity. At the high point, Felix offers heartfelt gratitude to the “galaxy of women” who have inspired him in his art and life. Cosima tells him “You’ve done something wonderful” and foster mother Siobhan says he was always “a little fighting creative spirit” (“Guillotines Decide” [Porter-Christie, Manson, & Morton, 2017]).

Felix has found his proper path as an artist—this show leads directly to a New York gallery exhibit which he characterizes as “drunkenly successful” (“To Right the Wrongs of Many” [St. Cyr, Manson, & Fawcett, 2017]). In the final scenes of the series, a lovingly slow pan of the home Sarah now shares with her daughter reveals a number of Felix’s pieces, in particular the portrait of Siobhan over the mantel and the second portrait of Sarah over the piano.

Helena: Ritual/Art

Helena (Tatiana Maslany), Sarah’s twin, was raised in a convent until located by members of the Prolethean religious cult, removed, and trained to assassinate the other clones. Her religious fervor, and her internal conflict over killing the other young women who share her face, manifest in ritualistic bouts of creative expression: drawings of stick figures, altered Barbie doll heads, body modification. She might be understood as an example of a naïve, outsider artist, driven to express herself in a primitive, non-verbal, or child-like manner and not thinking of what she produces as art. While her artistic expression seems to be without conscious reflection or even volition, it does satisfy some urge within her and evolves in tandem with her character arc.

We see this artistic expression of self in the face of trauma from an early age, in a flashback to her childhood in the convent in the final season (“One Fettered Slave” [Levine & Frazee, 2017]). Locked in a closet for her voyeuristic infractions, she scratches stick figures and a church on the walls. Later, under the watchful eye of her Prolethean mentor Tomas, she role-plays with Barbie dolls in a house she has built and decorated for them. The initial episodes of the first season show what these early habits have evolved into: She leaves Barbie doll heads at the scenes of her crimes, with their hair cut and colored to match that of her victims and their eyes blacked out (“Variation Under Nature” [Manson & Frazee, 2013], “Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est” [Elliott & Shaver, 2014]). She scratches or blacks out the eyes in photographs, a chilling threat once we learn that she goes for the eyes in fighting. She draws stick figures on the walls of the places she lives and elsewhere, repeating a figure representing a female clone, identically drawn and posed, over and over (“Effects of External Conditions” [Manson & Fawcett, 2013b], “Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est” [Elliott & Shaver, 2014]); like Felix, she expresses an existential discomfort with cloning and these endless mirror-images of herself in her art practice.

And she cuts herself, generally after a kill or at times when she needs the comforting distraction of physical pain. Her cutting takes the form of body modification art, angel wings she has carved into her back, something she started doing after her very first assassination (“Guillotines Decide” [Porter-Christie, Manson, & Morton, 2017]). After her first kill, she was told her targets were “dirty copies” of herself, the pure original; the wings distinguish her body at a physical level from those of her victims (as Alison’s tattoo distinguishers her body from the other clones) and reinforce her self-conception as an avenging and purifying angel.

Helena undergoes a long process of rehabilitation that eventually brings her over to the side of the other Leda clones aligned against Dyad and Neolution, a process beginning with her acknowledgement of Sarah as a human and a sister rather than a “dirty copy” and an abomination, a parallel to the way Felix’s art evolves to celebrate the uniqueness rather than sameness of the clone sisters.  This is indicated in her artistic expression in 2.4 (“Governed as it Were by Chance” [Cochrane & Frazee, 2014]) when, after being impregnated by and escaping the New Order Prolethian cult leader, she kills Rachel’s agent Daniel and rescues Sarah. The stick figures she draws in Rachel’s apartment with Daniel’s blood are now individuated: she draws herself with her wild mane of hair and a distinct baby bump, and herself and Sarah as a family unit with Sarah’s daughter Kira. Rushing (2018) observes that the story the figures tell now and from this point forward is “about becoming an individual, acquiring interiority, and bonding with others as family” and that the figures no longer represent a code but “concrete and embodied individuals” (160-161).

In season 4, pregnant and in hiding with Alison’s family, Helena is banished from Alison’s craft room as mentioned earlier, but takes her project to the family room, where she is seen at work on a collage of baby pictures—a scene of artistic chaos that will surely annoy Alison to no end. This period of using mainstream craft materials and techniques ends with her retreat to a camp in the woods There we see her feather-strewn altar which pairs an icon of the Virgin and Child with a photo of Sarah and Kira on either side of an Eastern Orthodox cross constructed from bones and hide thongs.

The final stage of Helena’s artistic development begins with her going into hiding in a convent—no longer a place of terror and torment for the more mature Helena (Croft, 2019, p.107), here she has a period of safety to reflect on her life and her impending motherhood.  She has made drawings of stick figures again, but this time on paper, not directly on the walls, and they are displayed on a wall of her room where others can see them. Another difference is that they are clearly in family groups, taller and shorter figures holding hands, all “concrete and embodied individuals” (Rushing, 2018, 160-161); the urge for family has been a motivation all of Helena’s life, and here we see specific rather than generic individuals as family.

Most importantly, though, Helena has turned to journaling as a means of expression. In a leather-bound diary she writes out and illustrates her story for her babies, telling of “my joys, my pain and sorrows, so they will walk a brighter path” (“Let the Children and Childbearers Toil” [Nelson & Wellington, 2017]). The drawings we see on the title page are a line of stick figures holding hands (clearly individuated as Sarah, Alison, Helena, and Cosima) and dark and light figures curled in a yin-yang-like circle, representing Sarah and Helena as twins in the womb and perhaps the twins she herself carries as well.

The final episode of the series shows Helena, like Felix and Alison, transformed as an artist by using her art to communicate and to foster community. Above the bassinets of her twin babies dangle stick-figure angels, male and female, constructed of twigs and feathers, and the room they share in the Hendrix’s garage is full of light and art. The almost-final scene shows Helena surrounded by her sisters and reading to them from her memoir, her “embroidery with many beginnings and no end” (“To Right the Wrongs of Many” [St. Cyr, Manson, & Fawcett, 2017]). As Alyson Buckman (2019, p.142) points out about this scene, “In order to heal and to return the social order to normalcy, survivors must both remember and speak the truth about their trauma. […] When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery.” Helena’s recovery has been, in part, a process of discovering the way in which she can best speak her truth and to whom she should speak it. For Helena, a combination of visual and literary art becomes “a means through which [she] can define [her] values and produce a positive identity based on these rather than […] simply on rejection of the Other” (Webb, 2014, p.106).

Conclusions, Comparisons, Connections

What connects all of these threads is the underlying “stronger together” theme of the whole series, manifesting particularly in the evolutionarily sound corollaries that connection and cross-fertilization are essential for growth, and that progress—and even mere survival—requires connection and cooperation. The artistic practices of these three characters are used to demonstrate these themes in a physically and emotionally compelling manner.

Alison’s art is less sterile when it is done honestly—to express herself, not to fit in or to hide her sins—and even more so when created in community with her husband. In exploring a mode of expression that feels truer to her, she frees herself from the overwhelming influence of her passive-aggressive mother and the pressure to fit in to the judgmental suburb of Bailey Downs. Alison’s outright rejection of “being crafty” has to be read with this nuance in mind, and in the context of her own individual development; it is not a blanket condemnation of craft.^[6] But it is an acknowledgement that the sort of crafting expected of her as a suburban soccer mom was not serving the deeper needs she discovered in her Jungian retreat—her needs to “lose control,” to confront her own inner chaos and shadow self, and to free herself as an individual from the conformity of the suburbs and the nightmare side of cloning. The roles she played in the musicals Blood Ties and Jesus Christ Superstar were far better pointers to the shadowy areas of her psyche that she needs to explore.

It is in part the influence of Felix on Alison that gives her the impetus to go on her voyage of self-exploration. While Fee is a ‘real artist,’ he does not sneer at her; he sees value in her as a person, he supports her in her fight with addiction, helps her with her stage performances, and so on. And her craft arguably influences the stenciling phase of his art.  He provides a model of how she can free herself to be an artist.

While the craft room often serves simply as character-defining shorthand and is not actually shown getting much use, this is in very sharp contrast with the way we see Felix at work creating art in his studio living space, where the tools and supplies of his art permeate the entire loft rather than being confined carefully to one room. Contrary to “romantic stereotypes about creative people and mental illness” (Feaver, 2019, p.13) it is when Felix manages to understand and constructively deal with his pain and his sense of isolation, when he begins seeing his sitters for who they are rather than painting how they make him feel, that his art becomes more successful. He finds blood family and purpose, and matures and explores a mythic framework for the women in his life that helps him to see them as individuals rather than copies of his sister. Felix’s art is more meaningful when it is not simply about his own identity, when it is more accessible symbolically and involves his “galaxy of women” as co-performers and celebrators: when it is created in community with his sitters.^[7]

Tatiana Maslany as Helena and Sarah Manning.

Orphan Black uses expectations about craft versus art and about gender and craft to make a point about art and personal connection—one that is kindred to points made by the “street craft” movement, with its emphasis on “accessibility and communality,” its “extension of the private” as “a kind of gift to the community” (Kuittinen, 2015, pp.12-13). Through art and craft, we “can confront and critique the notion of the Other and the tensions […] that obscure the commonality of the human” (Webb, 2014, p.93)—and yet at the same time celebrate the individual within that commonality. With Alison, we see that craft is sterile and a source of frustration when it is just a matter of meeting social and gender expectations and there is no heart or connection in it. In Felix’s case, Orphan Black implies that art lacks power when craft, discipline, and the power of art to communicate are neglected, and the art is only about the artist himself. Helena’s arc shows that art does not support community when it is purely a personal ritual and an expression of a private symbol system. Finding one’s true voice and means of expression are important, but even more important in Orphan Black is the power of art to strengthen group bonds and create connections of sympathy, understanding, and growth between individuals.

References

Endnotes