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