Which way is up?
- Jul 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 25
What M.C. Escher taught me about autism and parenting.
By Uttara Shidore in Mumbai
There are curious ways in which we connect seemingly unrelated things. Every June, I find myself thinking about a connection that exists only in my mind. June 17 marks the birth anniversary of M. C. Escher, my favourite artist. June 19 is my son's birthday. Together, they have shaped how I think about patterns, perception, and the many ways human beings make sense of the world.
Maurits Cornelis Escher, was a graphic artist born in the Netherlands in 1898. Though he had no formal training in mathematics, his work finds its most devoted admirers among mathematicians. Escher used tessellations, impossible architecture, and the careful manipulation of perspective to show how mathematical ideas could become a language for art.
The first time most people encounter an Escher image, they react with confusion. A staircase rises and falls simultaneously. Birds emerge from fish. A pair of hands draw each other into existence. Our eyes keep moving through the picture searching for solid ground, but it never quite appears. These images may look like visual puzzles, yet rather than offering a single answer, they invite us into a world where multiple viewpoints coexist, where certainty depends entirely on where we choose to stand.
For a long time, I searched for that same elusive solid ground in parenting. I believed there was a single right way to see, to learn, to communicate.
My son taught me otherwise. I needed to learn another way of seeing.
I have often wondered what it means to experience a world that is organised differently. Not wrong. Not deficient. Just different. Many autistic people describe noticing details that others overlook, recognizing patterns that remain invisible to most observers, or experiencing sensory information with an intensity that can be difficult for others to imagine. What appears insignificant to one person may be profoundly meaningful to another.
Escher's work invites a similar shift.
Which way is up?
Where does the beginning become the end?
Who decides what is inside and what is outside?
This coexistence of different realities lies at the heart of Escher’s Relativity. In this print, several figures inhabit the same building, yet each is governed by a different gravity. What is a floor for one, is a wall for another. A staircase that carries one person upward leads someone else down. They cross the same spaces without ever sharing quite the same world.
I often think of my son when I look at this print. We can sit in the same room, hearing the same sounds and seeing the same light, yet experience them very differently. The way he processes noise, balance, or light is not a broken version of my own. It is simply organised around a different axis.
Perception is not a uniform human experience. Escher built his life's work on this idea. His drawings repeatedly ask a question that autism has taught me to take seriously: what if the world itself has not changed, but the point from which it is being viewed has? What if the contradiction lies not in the drawing, but in our expectation that the world should conform to a single perspective?
Once perspective shifts, transformation often follows.
This is beautifully illustrated in the woodcut Sky and Water I where the empty spaces between a school of black fish slowly shift, interlocking until they morph into white birds taking flight. In this tessellation, one form gradually becomes another while remaining deeply connected to what came before. A fish becomes a bird. This transformation is visible only when one steps back and sees the pattern as a whole.
This mirrors our journey in ways I am still discovering. Progress in autism rarely announces itself. It is quiet: a new word, greater confidence in an unfamiliar situation, a skill that seemed out of reach becoming part of everyday life. Individually, these moments seem small. Together, they tell a different story, not only about the child, but also about the parent, who slowly learns to measure progress in entirely different ways.
This shift in mind-set brings to mind one of Escher's most intriguing works, Print Gallery. A man looks at a painting in a gallery, only to find that the gallery itself is inside the painting. It is a loop in which the observer becomes part of what is being observed.
When you become a parent, you expect a familiar sequence of milestones. Parenting a child with autism gradually reveals that the blueprint is only one way of seeing, never the only way.
What Escher asks of the viewer, autism asks of the parent: not to alter the picture, but to shift the frame through which growth and possibility are understood. Ultimately, you learn to inhabit a completely different architecture, finding beauty and structure in a framework that may appear confusing at first, but slowly begins to make sense.
Perhaps that is why Escher's work feels so familiar, almost as if we have lived inside it. But even when we begin to understand that architecture, the journey itself is rarely linear. That is why I find myself returning most often to Escher's Möbius Strip. A Möbius Strip is a mathematical surface with only one continuous side. It creates the illusion of endless repetition. It has also become, for me, a fitting metaphor for caregiving. There are periods when life seems trapped in the same cycle, yet the Möbius Strip reminds us that returning to a familiar point does not necessarily mean we have travelled in a circle. We may have traversed an entire surface without realizing it.
Every June, between Escher's birthday and my son's, I find myself returning to these connections, and about how the most meaningful journeys are rarely straight lines.
Uttara Shidore is a diversity and inclusion consultant, and a self-taught artist. She lives in Bombay with her husband and son. You can see more of her art on Instagram at @uttara.s
Images from the writer's personal collection
Also see, by Uttara Shidore:
The geometry of being, how I found meaning through patterns