Reflections on Yayoi Kusama through the lens of Evolving Art
We may look at the same thing and see something entirely different.
A flower can be a botanical form, a memory, a field of colour, or a rhythm of lines. Its appearance changes with the light, the distance, and the attention we give it. In art, these differences become possibilities: ways to explore what we perceive and what we bring to an image ourselves.
Yayoi Kusama’s work offers a compelling starting point for this thought. Through recurring dots, nets, organic forms, and mirrored environments, she developed a visual language that moved across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation.
In her mirror rooms, familiar relationships between objects, space, and the viewer become uncertain. Reflections multiply what is physically present, creating an experience that seems to extend beyond the room. Her first mirror installation, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, was presented in 1965.
For me, this raises a question: how much of what we experience belongs to the object, and how much emerges through the way it is presented and perceived?
This question is central to Evolving Art, the approach I am developing within my own artistic practice.
An original painting holds a particular composition, material presence, and moment of creation. Digitising it opens another space for exploration. Colour, texture, structure, scale, and rhythm can be reconsidered, revealing relationships that were less apparent in the original.
A quiet passage may become the centre of a new composition. A change in palette may alter its emotional character. A fragment, brought closer, may suggest an entirely different visual world.
The original remains an artwork in its own right. Each new interpretation develops through experimentation, intention, and critical selection. I look at what has changed, what remains meaningful, and whether the new work has found a character of its own.
I think of this as a continuing conversation with the image.
My background in architecture also shapes that conversation. I am interested in what happens when an artwork changes scale or enters another setting: how we encounter it, how long we spend with it, and which details become significant.
Through PROJECT R1000, these explorations can take the form of prints, art papers, cards, or bookmarks. Each format brings its own proportions and invites a different relationship with the composition.
Within Art Between Pages, that relationship becomes intimate and familiar—an image held in the hand and encountered repeatedly while reading.
Kusama’s work prompts this reflection on perception. Evolving Art is my own way of exploring it through the transformation of my original artworks.
One image can hold more than one possibility. Returning to it with another question may reveal something we had not yet seen.
Iliana Ovtcharova
Evolving Art | PROJECT R1000