07/09/2026
A beautiful mind has left this world.
Iâve been looking back through these photographs since hearing of the death of Yayoi Kusama, and feeling incredibly grateful that I got to take my family into her extraordinary world when You, Me and the Balloons came to Manchester in 2023.
And I mean into her world.
We didnât stand politely in front of the art and look at it. We walked through it, around it and underneath it. We played amongst it. We laughed. We touched, explored and became part of the experience.
And that feels particularly special now, because participation was never incidental to Kusamaâs work.
From her early happenings and performances in 1960s New York to her mirrored rooms and vast immersive installations, she spent a lifetime dissolving the boundaries between artwork, viewer and surrounding space. Her idea of âself-obliterationâ, losing the individual self within endlessly repeating dots, nets, reflections and forms, became one of the defining threads of an eight-decade career.
You, Me and the Balloons brought together three decades of her inflatable works for the first time. Some were more than ten metres tall. Giant dolls, pumpkins, tentacles and enormous constellations of polka-dot spheres filled the vast space at Factory International. It was Kusamaâs largest-ever immersive environment.
But what I remember most isnât the scale.
Itâs the joy.
I took the family and we all became children in there.
There arenât many artists whose work can do that. Fewer still whose work can be immediately understood and enjoyed by a child while carrying ideas about infinity, identity, repetition, anxiety, existence, love and our place within the universe.
Those famous dots werenât simply a visual signature.
Kusama experienced visions and hallucinations from childhood, seeing patterns, flowers and dots proliferating across the world around her. Rather than allowing those experiences to consume her, she transformed them into an artistic language entirely her own. Art wasnât simply her career. She spoke about it as something that enabled her to survive.
And she never really stopped.
Painting, sculpture, performance, poetry, fiction, fashion, film, mirr
