Kathryn Vercillo's Virtual Book Tour: The Artist's Mind

Special Edition Supporting the author of Create me Free

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This post is part of a month-long blog tour for The Artist’s Mind. It includes interviews, reviews, excerpts and more. You can find the full tour details here. The next stop on the tour will be tomorrow, August 30, 2023 over at Bryce Seto's Bird's Eye View.

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Kathryn Vercillo is a writer and an artist whose passion is to explore the multi-faceted relationship between creativity and wellness. Kathryn approaches her subject with a gentle, generous, and validating curiosity, inviting her reader to follow suit. 

Kathryn’s latest book, The Artist’s Mind, showcases the relationship between artists and their mental health struggles, including the psychosocial dimension of their unique experience, thinking about whether art helped or hindered -or perhaps both- their well-being. 

I was privileged to read the chapter relating the life story of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.  Straight away, I was compelled to find out more from the first paragraph stating that “Kusama is the top-selling female artist in the world and (…) has also lived in a mental health institution for more than half her life.”  My curiosity was piqued, trying to reconcile the idea of worldwide success with a lifelong struggle that required such a lengthy spell in an institution.  This apparent contradiction truly spoke to me as I too am fascinated with the existential path of artists and our understanding and personal experience of mental health and its many complexities.

Kusama’s childhood was “persistently traumatic” as we learn of a convoluted and painful dynamic between her parents, within which she was pawned, having to spy on her father’s infidelities to then report to her mother. Kusama then became the unfortunate recipient of her mother’s wrath. Kusama also recalls that her mother would destroy her creations before she could complete them, which instilled an urgency to creating which never left her.

Kusama was prey to hallucinations from an early age and would go on to use recurring images and themes in her artwork which can be traced back to those specific experiences.  

As well as battling her parents’ opposition to her work, Kusama also had to assert herself as a female Japanese artist in post-World War II America. Her resolve to break new ground was robust, yet the stress and struggle of curating her space fueled her anxiety into full-blown panic and suicidal attempts.  The worrying symptoms led to her looking for support, eventually starting a Freudian psychoanalysis. This uncovered Kusama’s all-consuming fear of sex, possibly rooted in childhood experiences, leading to her “making artistic penises, reproducing them again and again as a form of (…) self-therapy, hoping that the more she made them, (…) the less terrified she would be.”

One of Kusama’s significant theme is indeed repetition: “In Freudian theory, repetition compulsion is the idea that we keep doing the same thing over and over again trying to repeat, and thus repair, an early trauma.” This can be explicitly witnessed in her artwork filled with dots, flowers, nets, and mirror balls.

Alongside her prolific creativity, Kusama grew more depressed and suicidal.  She eventually returned to Japan and, for once unable to create, checked into an institution. There, she has -to this day -found a functioning routine allowing her to continue to create and access the therapeutic support she needs.  Kusama has tailored her own unique way of “managing madness,” having curated a space within which she feels safe.

Kathryn Vercillo invites her reader to contemplate whether Kusama’s controlled lifestyle -within a flexible and person-centered institution - has been a great fit to help her turn the volume down on ailments which might otherwise have debilitated her physical survival and her creativity.    

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Kathryn also writes Create Me Free, sharing fascinating compilations of her reading and her thoughts, please find the link below and enjoy great writing!

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