Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 31
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Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away
Yayoi Kusama, 2013
Installation
Yayoi Kusama (1929- ) is a Japanese artist well-known for her sculptures,
paintings, installations, videos, and performances. Although her work is often
playful, it stems from memories of trauma and hallucinations. Her ubiquitous
motifs of polka dots, flowers, pumpkins, stuffed furniture, and phalluses burst
with the energy of Pop Art. The Infinity Mirrored Room helps me envision the
dialogical space of narrative therapy, with the client as a decentered, small part of
the world. Kusama (2002/2015) contributes to this vision of narrative therapy in
her description of her art practices. She writes, “My desire was to … measure the
infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it ... I wanted to
examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle
among billions” (p. 23).
Standing in The Infinity Mirrored Room, I imagine a multidirectional narrative
conversation. Its lights evoke a Jorge Luis Borges (1962) quote describing “… one
sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in
some way involve the stars” (p. 23). Kusama’s points of light hover as
simultaneous moments in time, virtual potentials for new storylines. A teaching
tool in narrative therapy uses dots on a page to illustrate clients’ lived
experiences. As we re-author clients’ stories, we release these dots from
dominant narratives, allowing them to be reconfigured into new constellations of
meaning. Like Borges’ labyrinth of stars, our conversations are rhizomatic, with an
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
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