Ekphrastic: On Dawn Cerny's Portmeirion

Remember that TV show The Prisoner? It was a British show from the ‘60s and still has a huge cult following. The prisoner himself was surly and dour and serious and he resigned from being a spy so he was drugged and when he woke up he was trapped in The Village and he couldn’t escape, though every episode he tried. They told him, “You are Number Six,” but he kept saying, “I am not a number! I am a free man!” There were no free women.

The prisoner was played by Patrick McGoohan. In the ’80s, there was a great little pop song called “I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape,” by The Times, whose songs were often about how surface-y Western culture is, in a true and funny way.

The Village looked like a giant toy, like the pictures in a kids’ book had come to life. The cottages were yellow and pastel green and lavender and the grounds were bright green with bright colored flowers and the big buildings looked like great big cake decorations. The Village was surrounded by mountains on three sides and on the fourth side the ocean, so it was gorgeous, but you could not escape.

The Village was played by an actual village in Wales, Portmeirion, construction upon which began in 1925 and ended in 1975. Designed and built by Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis to be a tourist attraction—a folly—the town was a pretty paradise you wouldn’t ever want to leave.

Was the postwar American kitchen supposed to be a pretty paradise for women? In the US during the years following World War II, there was prosperity (for white people) and renewed consumption and gadgets like washing machines and coffee makers and toaster ovens and dishwashers and cake mixes and frozen vegetables and white bread and instant Jell-O and Tang. Then later TV and TV dinners and frozen pie and pizza and Pop-Tarts, so you didn’t have to actually cook, just heat it up and throw away the packaging—so much packaging! So you could work less hard at being a maid and spend more time being a pretty wife.

Why would anyone want to escape that place?
How could anyone stand to stay?

You know what else Portmeirion is? A classic line of pottery. My mother-in-law gave us a couple pieces of it, and it is actually, truly beautiful: clean white ground overlaid with precise and stunning designs of plants and flowers derived from botanical illustrations from the 19th century.

Portmeirion Pottery was designed by Susan Williams-Ellis, the daughter of Clough Williams-Ellis, the man who designed Portmeirion village.

Was something running in their blood?
What passed and what did not pass from the father to the girl?
What world was father trying to keep?
What world would girl or daughter or woman make for her own?

Portmeirion is also the name of Dawn Cerny’s show at the Frye. You get there via a sort of hall of mirrors, wherein you see a woman’s face and body and clothes cut into small but sometimes recognizable parts, like an overheated photo booth has exploded into bits and the pictures being shot therein—the lady being shot—exploded into bits and the bits then put on top of a mirror where you’re meant to see yourself. (See note below.)

The first room in this Portmeirion, Kleenex Side-table for Simone Weil, is an intimate space, the bedroom where the (absent) woman, Simone Weil, is…sneezing? Crying? Dying? The bed is a weird shade of purple, like it was painted with grade-school poster board paint. The woman (absent, but we know who she is because Cerny tells us) is prematurely old because of her lifelong carelessness of her physical self. A Jew, a 1940s political activist, an essayist, a ruthlessly self-critical spiritual pilgrim, a possible anorexic, and maybe a deathbed convert.

(Fanny Howe has an essay about Weil and Weil’s maybe-deathbed conversion. What was she trying to escape? Did she get away to where she hoped? What had she hoped?)

The prettiest thing in this room is the light yellow liner of the trash can in the side table, the place where you put your Kleenexes with your bodily debris. It almost looks diaphanous, especially when you see it against the sheer yellow veil on the not so far-away wall. Is the woman regarding that inviting veil? The light that may or not lie just beyond? Or is she looking at that old man in the painting by her bed (Portrait of Jacob Stern by Ludwig Knaus, 1877, from the Frye’s founding collection)? Is she being welcomed into the next life by someone gone before? A kind, unworldly dad?

There were only 17 episodes of The Prisoner, and the prisoner never escaped. There’s fewer than 10 episodes in Cerny’s Portmeirion. They are short sweet clips of her dancing or hanging out by herself or with her kid in front of different paintings from the Frye’s founding collection. The 19th-century works are mostly dour, a place we inherited but also—because of women like the smart, brave, and funny Dawn Cerny, and her smart, brave, funny foremothers—have been able to escape.

Note: Natalie Krick’s suite of collages based on images of Marilyn Monroe, aka Norma Jeane Mortenson, Krick cut out of Bert Stern’s book, The Complete Last Sitting, which comprised 2,600 shots of Monroe taken six weeks before she died.

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REBECCA BROWN is an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and artist, with fourteen books published in the US and abroad. She was the co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program and recently retired after teaching for more than 30 years in settings as diverse as public schools, universities, prisons, homeless encampments, and centers for at-risk youth. Her collection of essays, A Traveller’s Companion, is forthcoming from Publication Studio in 2026.

DAWN CERNY has had solo exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Henry Art Gallery, and is the recipient of two Washington State Artist Fellowships, the Betty Bowen Award, the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Portmeirion is on view at Frye Art Museum through June 22.

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Ekphrastic poetry is a literary device through which the writer responds to a visual work of art through use of vivid description, extending the experience of an artwork into the realm of language.