Chennai women artists share self-portrait journeys on Frida Kahlo birth anniversary

On Frida Kahlo's birth anniversary, women artists in Chennai shared their experiences with self-portraiture, detailing how painting and photography serve as cathartic mediums to express personal struggles, body insecurities, and emotional vulnerabilities. The artists reflected on how creating these portraits allows them to establish a self-paved visual identity, drawing inspiration from Kahlo's legacy of depicting pain with resilience.

For Chennai-based self-portrait artist Bindya TS, the medium became a way to navigate childhood insecurities regarding her body and her abstract thoughts. Her photographs capture unfeigned versions of herself, highlighting her brown skin, scars, and tattoos. Bindya frequently incorporates the color red into her self-portraits to embrace feminine energy and empower her creative process. Her photographic series titled 'Emotions' documented a dark phase of her life, capturing raw moments of pain and silence as a form of relief.

Irene, a self-taught artist, explained that photography evolved from a means of getting good portraits into a monthly ritual of self-exploration. Whenever she feels low, she uses her camera to capture personal, quiet moments like reading a poem or singing a song in her room. According to Irene, these unshared photographs serve as a way of letting go of disturbing thoughts and archiving herself in the moment.

Akshaya Parthasarathy, an arts student, described self-portraits as a space to experiment without the pressure of failure. Her paintings have unintentionally documented different stages of her life. In her self-portrait titled 'Green frog', Parthasarathy shifted her palette away from her usual dark and moody environments to explore a new approach to painting.

Artist Jitha Karthikeyan shared that her self-portraits make the transience of time, identity, and existence a tangible experience. Her painting, 'Where Would Our Roots Rest If Not in Land?', conveyed her grief over losing her ancestral home. Another work, 'Erasure and Beyond', was her attempt to deal with the reality of death by painting a cherished childhood memory.