Interview Artist Laxmi Hussain
THE WICK: What’s a typical Monday like for you?
Laxmi Hussain:
Monday’s are a bit busy for me, rallying sleeping reluctant kids feels like it takes so much more on a Monday (do they ever get enthusiastic to wake up Monday?)
My studio week is quite specific to accommodate working with clients in different time zones, so my Monday studio hours sit between 1-6pm. Scheduling in my hours very specifically makes my time in the studio very intentional and so I often start with a cuppa and then straight into my work.
Currently I’ve been working on several painting pieces for different projects all at the same time so I’ve just been diving straight in. I put on something to watch (I love crime dramas, and lots of japanese animation) and let that play in the background whilst I paint away.
TW: You have three gorgeous children. How did becoming a mother affect your creativity and how has the balance changed as your kids have grown?
LH: Ahh thank you! It all is just that isn’t it…a balancing act. Up until September 2024, I spent 4 years in the studio with my youngest in here almost every day and now that he is at school it feels quite lonely and has taken quite a lot of time for me to settle into being solo in here. I feel like I spent 4 years juggling the naps, short windows of time, short fuses, quiet lulls, and restless days and now I can expand, metaphorically. I feel like that should have a huge body of work to represent the expanse of time I’ve had without a young child in tow, but actually I think it just meant that I could come in here and my mind didn’t have quite as many tabs open and so the work slowed down, became a bit more intentional and maybe represented a growth in skill from being allowed the time.
TW: Has experiencing pregnancy and birth yourself changed how you portray women’s bodies in your art?
LH: 100% I think so much of the way I was raised in the generation that I’m in meant that the way I saw women’s bodies before was very much influenced by the male gaze, because up until the last 5-10 years, let’s face it a lot of it was governed by how we are deemed to be attractive – usually to men. And I know we still have a long way to go, but I just stopped caring what other people think of my body after it carried me through all of these experiences, especially after the 3rd time, that I needed to reflect that in my work and change that narrative for myself. And that always changes, I have just watched my younger sister become a mother for the first time and it’s also quite something to see that from the other side and to admire a woman you are so close to encounter and embrace motherhood, you realise how unimportant our physicality is and how ridiculous it is that we put so much pressure on women to look and be a certain way when we have the capacity to grow actual people inside our bodies – like making eyeballs, that honestly just blows my mind.
TW: The colour blue holds a particular significance and connection for you to your mother. How has your relationship to your signature colour evolved?
LH:
Yes it does, I have so many deep core memories of my mum in blue, and the one I share often is the first time she took us home to the Philippines to meet her family when I was 5. I remember a specific resort visit to a place called Hundred Islands during that trip where we had to leave my younger siblings behind with my grandparents and my mum was wearing a double denim blue ensemble – I remember the day, I remember the water, her outfit, so much of it.
It is now nearly 7 years since my mother died and my obsession with blue really developed as she left this world, and it feels like she left it to me. I now truly call it an obsession, like Maggie Nelson describes in her book Bluets, about being in a relationship with the colour, it’s a familiarity and a comfort I can’t fully describe to anyone, and friend who welcomes me everytime I come into the studio with, something I nurture by my constant devotion to it. Like having children, we can’t explain the true extent of the feelings we have for our kids, and I can’t ever explain the full expanse of the love I shared with my mother, but it’s there and it’ll always be a part of me.
“You realise how unimportant our physicality is and how ridiculous it is that we put so much pressure on women to look and be a certain way when we have the capacity to grow actual people inside our bodies.”
