Caution: Madness Within

The poem chosen for this project, “Granny” by Koyamparambath Satchidanandan is written in Malayalam, one of the many languages spoken in India.

Upon first glance, the letterforms of the Malayalam language conjured images of fluid lines and intricate swirling patterns. There was a sense of doodling in a notebook and daydreaming. It is a beautiful written language system. After reading the English translation of the poem and discovering its dark, morbid nature, I thought there was such an interesting juxtaposition of form and content: the beautiful, delicate letterforms conveying the dark, twisted meaning. Immediately, I thought of irreverent adult coloring books that display cuss words in elegant scripts.

The Malayalam characters were broken down into the shapes and pieces that form the glyphs. Those pieces were then used to construct a series of six mandalas. Next, the mandalas were paired with single line drawings to create coloring book pages. Finally, the book was expanded into a full art box including colored pencils, paints, and souvenir pins. The word “Madness” in the art box title was also created using Malayalam characters.