DIGITAL COPY ON MAGZTERto a corporeal entity suddenly infested with life.
Princess Pea, she came to be called, a portmanteau
of the anonymous artist’s two central thematic
concerns – the mythical category of Princess-hood,
and the imagining of the shoot as a specimen of
the Pea family. This was her authorial intervention,
inventing a being that was at once her reverberation
and her emanation that stemmed from her and was
yet unique, signalling the birth of her Other I, her
Second Self. The wearing of the oversized head by her
creator signalled her transformation from 'real' self to
her imaginative other.
The alter ego’s outward appearance is like that of a
living doll, a genetic cross between Max Fleischer’s
Betty Boop, the world’s first female flapper cartoon,
and a Japanese anime character. The pea that was
an irritant to the Real Princess was recast as a social
malaise and the artist as a humanist abnormally
sensitive to all that causes suffering. Her mission
was to celebrate and empower the girl child
by questioning the manner in which women’s
perceptions of their own bodies are negatively
constructed while critiquing the unnatural ideals to
which they aspire that continue to be dictated by
patriarchy. Her existence was conceived as a potential
antidote to the pressures of conformity.
The new limited-edition series of 500 wooden dolls
traces its imaginative origins to ‘Pecked, Jostled, and
Teased’, Princess Pea’s debut solo at Delhi’s Exhibit
320, where she had already extended the parameters
of her universe by peopling them with toy dolls and
animated cartoons, thereby referencing the activity of
play that is exigent to the process of socialisation and
gender normativity. Her series ‘Missing Toys’ had herFall and Rise, Princess Pea, Wooden
Sculptures, December 2015
Image Courtesy of the ArtistIAF - Delhi Connecting Art/ FEB 2016 - MAR 2016 / ARTS ILLUSTRATED /^107