TW: SA
This artist has influenced me deeply throughout my life. What I love about her most is her whole life was a rebellion, a rebellion against the patriarchy, against silence, against smallness. She made a world where women were huge, divine, sacred and wild, and she built it from her own broken pieces.
She Had A Mind That Wouldn’t Stay Small
Niki was born in 1930 to a wealthy French-American family, but her wealth was not a protective one. She was raped by her father at 11. A wound so deep it went unnamed for years. But, as trauma always does, it lived in her body. It waited. Until she was ready to create with it.
She married young, became a very young mother, and then fell apart. She had a full breakdown and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Given electroshock therapy and heavily medicated. And somewhere in that darkness, she found something. While still in hospital she picked up a brush and started painting like her life depended on it, because it did.
“I had to create, or I would die.”
Niki didn’t make art with her head. She made it with her nervous system. Her visions were messy, spiritual, feral, sacred. There was also a child-like quality to her work, I like to believe this was her inner child, her inner artist screaming to be seen, to be witnessed, to be understood, to be healed.
Her Art Career Started With A Bang
In the 1960s, she made her name with her "Tirs" (Shooting Paintings):
She filled bags with paint, enclosed them in plaster, and shot at them with a rifle in front of an audience. Each gunshot splattered colour, releasing anger, trauma, and divine chaos. She aimed at symbols of patriarchy.
“I shot against all men, big, small, fat, thin, against daddy, against my brother. Because it was fun and it made me feel great, I loved to see the picture bleed and die. I became a terrorist in art. Painting is crime. I killed the painting.”
Her art was a purge. A prayer. A scream. And she refused to ever stop screaming.
To Me She Was A Goddess, She Sculpted Them Too.
From the rage, she gave birth to joy.
She began sculpting giant, voluptuous, brightly-coloured "Nanas", dancing, birthing, spiralling goddesses of feminine power.
They were round, playful, unapologetically alive. They took up space, they had no shame and they celebrated womanhood in a way that was sacred and absurd at once.
She reclaimed the female body and was championed by feminists for doing so.
“Yes of course, I am all of them.”
Her work was full of colour, life, absurdity, chaos , everything women were taught to repress. And she made it big.
She Adored Trees
Niki had a deep reverence for trees. She had a symbolic, mythic, spiritual revereance for trees and nature.
She created works like The Tree of Life, where she placed a dryad, a female spirit, right at the centre of the trunk. Around her swirled chaos: war, death, sickness. But the tree still stood. Rooted. Living. She was saying something about resilience. About holding opposites. About the feminine being a living axis of the world.
“The incredible trees, glorious. Nature, and underlying everything.”
She also made a sculpture called Arbre-Serpents (Serpent Trees) in fibreglass and mosaic.
This piece merges tree and serpent symbolism, suggesting a mythic, transformative nature energy.
Trees, like women, like her art, hold things. And they keep growing.
Then, With Her Greatest Work, She Proved Women Could Work On A Monumental Scale.
For 20+ years, Niki poured herself into building The Tarot Garden in Tuscany.
She made 22 massive sculptures based on the Tarot’s major arcana. She lived inside one of them, The Empress, covered in mirrored tiles. She literally slept inside the goddess she sculpted. She built her own mythology. And lived in it. If you’re ever in Tuscany, Italy, this place is a must visit!
“It’s a sort of joyland”
What She Gave Us
Niki was too much, and she never shrank.
She made art that was chaotic, brilliant, emotional, alive. She showed that healing doesn’t have to be quiet. That beauty doesn’t mean perfection. That art can hold what words can’t.
“Very early on I decided to become a heroine. What did it matter who I would be? The main thing was that it had to be difficult, grandiose, exciting.”
She teaches us that our pain isn’t shameful. It’s material. It’s energy. It’s sacred. That rage can become a ritual. That art can be an offering. That women don’t have to be “good” to be holy.
Why She Moves Me
I paint with feeling. I create from vision. My work is intuitive, symbolic, sometimes strange. Crows, portals, sacred geometry. I don’t always know what it means, but I feel it.
When I found Niki’s story, I felt seen.
She reminds me that art can be a weapon, a temple, a spell. That you can turn trauma into beauty by letting it speak.
