[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]
Drawing for me is a sort of meditation.
I think everything begins and ends with the drawing.
Whenever I do a project, I draw it out.
So, it's kind of a basic language,
and then I do some things in between.
It's all about collaging.
A lot of what I do as being an artist
is creating a voice for myself
because I didn't have one for so long.
In 1965, I got pregnant.
In the fifth month of my pregnancy,
I was having trouble breathing
and came down with a heart condition called cardiomyopathy.
I went into heart failure.
I was under an oxygen tent during that pregnancy,
in a hospital.
I was unable to walk
or to do anything for many, many months.
When you are experiencing the threat of death,
you become so aware of time.
That's really a gift,
to become so sick early in my life.
It made you value the time you had
and the fact that you can't really waste time.
Because so much of my illness depended on breathing,
I added the sound as it was getting better
to a couple of my wax sculptures.
[PLAYBACK OF RECORDED BREATHING SOUNDS]
[VOICE FROM CASSETTE PLAYER] --Oh, there you are.
--I've been waiting for you all day.
--I'm so glad that you've come to see me.
--What's your name?
I took a night class at UCLA
on how you cast wax.
Since I didn't have anybody else around, I cast my face
and made the wax cast from myself.
When you're so isolated, you hear more.
[RECORDED BREATHING SOUNDS]
After my breath itself, I added interaction and dialogue.
To me, it was sort of like a drawing.
It was sound that extended into space.
So that became part of the work.
In the seventies,
women artists were just becoming aware of how they were made invisible.
The early challenges were getting somebody to show my work,
and nobody would.
Eventually,
the University of California at Berkeley invited three women to have exhibitions
and I was one of them.
But they wanted to show only my drawings.
I think they thought that drawings were safe
and good draftsmanship and all of that.
But along with that,
I put in a couple of my wax sculptures that talked.
Within two days,
the museum closed the show.
They said, "Media isn't art."
"Sound isn't art."
And they completely closed the exhibition down.
Being rejected and being made invisible by the museum system
was really the best thing that happened to me.
The cultural experience of having your voice suppressed
has made speech, and talking,
and having a voice,
really important in what I do.