Promising Mad Women by Jackie Mantey

Promising Mad Women by Jackie Mantey is a collection of acrylic canvas paintings that reimagine female “madness” as a sacred inheritance of instinct, pain, and potential. Each painting reclaims a name that history once tamed—saints, ghosts, lovers, myths—forming a chorus of potential unbecoming, their beauty edged with warning. Painted as jawless, faceless, or disembodied paper dolls—a form that encourages both self-expression and social constraint—the series explores the contradictions of becoming one’s feminine self within a world constantly trying to define it. These figures refuse containment even as they exist within it.