Critical review with Adarsha Ajay

Written by Nigel Ip During the last ten years of Frida Kahlo’s life, the Mexican painter kept an illustrated diary, filling it with evocations of her deepest emotions, struggles, and creative thoughts. Confined to her bed in the Casa Azul because of a failed spinal surgery, she wrote in her diary: ‘I am not sick. I am broken. But, I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.’

More than 50 years later, Kahlo’s optimistically vulnerable spirit continues to resonate with women artists in the 21^st century, particularly in the work of Adarsha Ajay. Originally from Kerala on the south-western tip of India, Ajay’s creative practice documents her transformative journey in mind and spirit since moving to the UK in 2023, where she graduated with an MA in Painting from Arts University Bournemouth in 2024.

Speaking openly with Ajay, her traumatic resentment of the strict, patriarchal systems governing India’s culture and society is vehemently clear. In her hometown, she felt oppressed, trapped, and silenced, whereas in the UK she found freedom of expression through encounters with Western concepts and lifestyles; Ajay sees it as a kind of rebirth, shedding one cultural skin to nurture another. This fusion of old and new identities informs Ajay’s stylistic approach to painting, which merges traditional Indian iconography with signifiers of Western modernity.

Figure 1: Her Awakening

In her painting series Alchemy of the Self (2024 – ongoing), Ajay explores womanhood as a collection of fragmented and conflicting experiences. The nude woman is both a self-portrait of Ajay’s tortured soul and a personification of collected female experiences from other women in her life. In doing so, they can be read both as epiphanies felt by the artist and as safe spaces for women to project their own experiences of trauma, anxiety, and depression. The series overall is a spiritual journey towards self-healing, one that is riddled with challenges rooted in reality.

The first two works in the series, Her Awakening and Her Offering, represent two sides of a cathartic coin. The former utilises varying states of unfinish to depict the early stages of self-realisation in the presence of a crumbling worldview, represented by a mandala containing Hindu deities and sacred symbols. Still attached to her domestic duties – signified by cooking utensils tied to her foot – Ajay’s spirit, outlined in blue, leaves her past life and stumbles on to a clean slate in The Awakening.

Figure 2: Her Offering

Her spiritual journey continues in Her Offering, where traditional Indian values and society’s judging eyes literally melt in the background. Under these changing circumstances, Ajay’s soul has completely given in to the transformative process of spiritual healing, enabling her to regain her strength. In the painting, we see the soul manifest as an earthly body, physical and real, but still just as vulnerable as before; a green sash blinds her eyes, representing her lack of confidence in this new world she has found herself wanting.

The third painting in the series, She, has a clearer message. Set against blue clouds symbolising suppressed mental states, fiery flames of passion, and more judging eyes, a nude, voluptuous woman is presented before us like an object of desire. However, her face is hidden by a yellow shroud consisting of torn pieces of paper, a gesture that represents the erasure of personal identity and of one’s voice. Poignantly, the crumpled paper with its rough surface acts like a metaphor for Ajay’s own experiences of domestic violence. Furthermore, the shadowy presence of a black bull looms behind her, which Ajay considers a symbol of patriarchal dominance but also latent strength that women can confront and embody for themselves.

Figure 3: She

Finally, Desire & Divinity presents Ajay’s soul in her most vulnerable state, struggling to find peace via spiritual healing while the scars left by emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse from men and society taunt her forever. Faceless, generic, and crouching like a classical Venus type, her smooth body is occasionally marked with flecks of impasto. The pleasures of the flesh are the enemy here, most obviously signified by an erect pink vibrator. Approaching her from behind is the blue spirit of a stallion – a symbol of society’s expectation of sex from women, according to Ajay, with its hoof invading the physical realm in which the woman inhabits. A snake attempts to ward it off – itself a symbol of resistance – however, the woman’s blue left hand suggests she may have succumb to these desires on her own accord.

It is clear Ajay’s paintings are layered and complex, perhaps even a little mysterious. Using personal experiences as a conduit for growth and renewal, her practice sees art-making as a form of therapy, one that investigates society’s suppression of women and ways to overcome those past traumas for herself and others. While she expands on the Alchemy of the Self series, Ajay plans to implement her vision of psychological and spiritual healing in a more community-focused direction, through workshops and art therapy sessions.

If one returns to Frida Kahlo’s diaristic reminiscences, one will find she also wrote: ‘Rebellion against everything that chains you.’

I think that sums up Adarsha Ajay’s indomitable spirit very well.