Yayoi Kusama – 'The modern Alice in Wonderland'

 




"I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland."

The 'High Priestess of polka dots', Yayoi Kusama has lived in a world of hallucinations since she was a child. With infinite dots covering her canvases, rooms, objects and even her clothes, she has compulsively and single mindedly created art as a way to deal with constant trauma, pain, anxiety and fear.

In 1977 she checked into a sanatorium in Tokyo as a means of dealing with her obsessive-compulsive neuroses. In her 90s now, she continues to live there and create art every single day, turning up at her studio in a wheelchair to sometimes work for 50-60 hour shifts. A state of mind she calls an "indescribable spell."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Begum Hazrat Mahal - The Begum who defied Queen Victoria

Image
As anyone familiar with Lucknow will agree, Begum Hazrat Mahal was a woman whose name every child today will know. Born Muhammadi Khanum in Faizabad (c.1820) in the Kingdom of Awadh, she was sold to royal agents as a child, becoming a courtesan, and eventually the wife and Begum of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. In the lead-up to 1857 and the First War of Independence, the Kingdom of Awadh was annexed by the British, and the Nawab exiled to Kolkata. What started as a ‘sepoy mutiny’ soon spread like wild fire, with many regions simultaneously taking up arms against the British. The Begum decided she was staying in Lucknow, and that she was going to put up a fight. Appointing her 12 year old son Birjis Qadr king, she became the regent and, uniting Hindus and Muslims as well as encouraging women to take up arms, she began to gather troops and mobilise masses, turning the rebellion into a people’s movement to reckon with. Laying siege to Lucknow, her troops continued to exert pressure on the Bri
Read more

Frida Kahlo – Revelation in self portraits

Image
Extreme pain never left Frida's side, and flowed into her greatest paintings over and over. Crushed by polio as a child, she learned to wear long Mexican skirts to hide her limp and wasted leg. Barely surviving an accident with multiple fractures, she put herself together with leather braces and plaster casts. With an easel constructed so she could paint in bed, and regular morphine injected into her veins, painting became her singular outlet and form of expression. The exaggerated attention to her face with Mexican 'Maria' braids, flowers and jewellery was perhaps to take the attention away from her broken body. Although she rejected her Catholic roots, influences resurface in her art, more so in times of heightened pain. Frida's self portraits (a third of her entire body of work) were her way of holding a mirror to heartbreak, betrayal and suffering. Sometimes she is redeemed by her pet monkey Chango, and sometimes she bleeds out with no one to save her, like
Read more

Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi - A Lifelong Fight for Equality

Image
A woman whose life had many ‘firsts’ , Muthulaksmi Reddi’s first real victory was probably to beat the odds and get an education. Brilliant and feisty, she was the first woman to join an all-male college in 1907 where she studied medicine, then the first female surgeon, and in a later avatar, British India’s first female legislator in 1926. Faced with ridicule and trauma in her formative years for being born to a woman from the Devadasi community, she would become highly empathetic to the community’s plight and as a lawmaker was instrumental in passing a bill against the trafficking of women and children. (The only woman in a panel of over 100 members). Avvai Home and Orphanage was founded by her in 1931, when 3 girls from Devadasi families knocked on her door one night, having run away from home with nowhere to go. It still stands today as a shelter for women and girls, irrespective of caste or religion. At the age of 28, her mother succeeded in convincing Muthulakshmi to get marr
Read more