Nobody’s little lady: giant women walk in Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden
Last July I stepped into a woman’s bedroom and peeped out of a porthole. The bedroom was inside the breast of a sculpture of a monumental black sphinx, the porthole was her nipple. The interior was a mosaic of fractured mirrors, even the fridge was encrusted. I had entered the home of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle.
My porthole moment was the culmination of an obsession sparked years earlier. When I was young I saw an image from an installation she created in Stockholm in 1966 which featured a gigantic, cartoonish, fat woman figure lying on her back with her legs open. This figure was a sculptural building and a group of people queued to enter through her vagina. I wanted to climb up inside a woman too, I still do.