In this particular accumulation, Kusama put aside her brushes and paint and picked up paper savers (circular adhesives used to reinforce holes punched into paper) and charcoal. She affixed the white paper savers to white paper as “found” polka dots, covering its entire surface. She then delicately shaded much of the space between the paper savers with smoky, gestural charcoal marks. Here she merges traditional artistic mediums—charcoal, paper—with everyday materials, in this case, a common office supply. Kusama continued to incorporate everyday items like postage stamps, furniture, clothing, and household items into her works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations. She covered some of these items with accretions of protuberances or polka dots, and crowded others into compositions reflecting the massing, hallucinatory images that assailed her. “So many different images leaped into my eyes that I was left dazzled and dumbfounded,” she has said about one such hallucination.
Additional text from In The Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting online course, Coursera, 2017
