Excerpt from my life story:
The segment of my life that I chose to translate into an object, is actually a collection of of instances in my life, when i felt like an identity was being thrust upon me, a s a result of a label stuck to my being whether by myself, or by the people in my life.
My family like most families, is pretty dysfunctional, and so growing up I was told that I was: Cute, beautiful, princess, “kokila”(It is a song bird), selfish, greedy, gluttonous, rude, bad girl,loud, wild,sticky, shy, delicate, weak, awkward, annoying, fidgety, hyper, problem.
Then in school I heard: Creative, talented, ugly, sick, nerd, bookworm, shy, talkative, awkward, blabbermouth, quiet, disgusting, lame, sad, depressed, boring, intelligent, immature, weird, strange, dull, pathetic, honest, blunt.
In junior college, and my previous college I was: Strange, funny, fun, intelligent, stupid, smart, sarcastic, honest, pretty, artist, creative, sad, dark, writer, good girl.
This past year I heard: Intriguing, hilarious, cool, funny, fun, friendly, ‘sanskari’, un-‘sanskari’, bitch, slut, wild, messy, and the one that i hate the most- manic pixie dream girl. (The guy who gave me that label is still convinced that he was complimenting me)
I have just begun to reflect over all these labels you collect over the years, catching yellow sticky notes, like new age burrs, as you run through the crowd.Some of the labels, are forced on you, and others you give yourself. I think, I have always treated the like clothes, trying them on to see if they fit before deciding whether to trash them or keep them, sometimes finding myself unable to shake off an unpleasant label, just because somewhere in my heart, I suspect that it fits me.
Some words I absolutely loathed as a kid, now sound warm, and kind, flattering even. Every adjective in a language is technically a label. And we spend our lives covering ourselves in metaphorical sticky notes, and struggling to get them off.
However, to be honest, just as a negative label makes me struggle against a layer of identity, positive and flattering ones make me feel fake. I feel like I a faking being ‘ excited’ or ‘talented’ , or ‘energetic’, or even ‘happy’. And when no one is looking, I feel empty inside.
The object i chose is a coffee cup with surrealist doodles on it, covered in post its. The post its are the labels, that cover us , and hide our true selves or the projections of a self we believe is our own, and is not usually known to people around us. The doodles here, my projection, of myself is a slightly out of it, eccentric girl who is often haunted by her own imagination and thoughts. She reacts to the words, she doesn’t like in the way they are intended by embracing them and reclaiming them, for instance, the word slut. However, like I said, when no one is looking I feel empty, and so once, you lift the lid of the cup off, its black and hollow inside, like a void, or a space wishing to be a void, so as to reach an absolute resolution, but failing even in being empty, as a result of the black paint peeling off the walls.
I chose a coffee cup to depict that container that is my metaphysical body, because i drink a lot of coffee, and I always scribble on my coffee cups before throwing them away. Coffee cups for me mark a lot of random ideas and incomplete trains of thought that get rejected and abandoned.
