This woman’s art project takes inspiration from how humans view their bodies

Indu Harikumar's art project draws inspiration from real stories of people and captures the essence of it.

By: Anumeha Saxena |
April 19, 2017 12:00 pm

Indu Harikumar, an artist, illustrator and storyteller, has crowdsourced her on-going art project ‘Body of Stories’ and the idea of the project is quite interesting. She has aksed people to share their stories and not just any story, she wants people to share their exprerience and views about their own body. One of the lines under the submission guidelines reads ‘I would also love to receive your stories on slut shaming, sexual agency, cultural stigma, sexuality, racism, off-limit behaviours, dating, marriage, abortion, period stigma, abuse, social conditioning, coming out, disability, disease, and so on.’

The idea behind it was to get inspired by these varied experiences about human body and create an artwork capturing the essence of that experience. Indu has got a lot of mails and messages and has by far created about 29 art pieces for her ‘Body of Stories’ project, each telling a story of its own. So that the individual stories don’t get lost in the art of representation and interpretation, Indu has also shared the original stories in the descriptor on her Facebook page, Induviduality.

The one below talks about ‘parenting done right’. Aptly titled ‘Raising a boy in a man’s world’, the story behind this painting is of a woman from Delhi, who shares how she and her husband never stopped their six-year-old son from choosing between toys labelled ‘pink’ and blue’. They just let their son be.

The artwork below speaks about how a woman was shamed for her small breasts and how she was bullied in college and called names. But slowly, she found her lost confidence, accepted herself and even started loving her body.

For more from her collection from ‘Body of Stories’, check out her Facebook page or Instagram account.