/ distrust /
Most people believe they don’t have enough talent.
What they’re really missing is trust in their very first impulse.
That first impulse arrives before technique.
Before experience.
Before certainty.
Art begins before skill.
Everything that came later was learned.
Only the first impulse was yours.
/ childhood /
I rarely remember my childhood as a sequence of events.
It comes back to me in separate sensations.
I remember my grandfather, always silent. I remember his presence, that particular kind of silence beside someone who did not need to keep talking in order to be there.
I remember the smell of carnations in my grandmother’s garden. Sometimes I think smells remember our lives better than we do.
I remember the cold window glass I would press a drawing against so I could trace it.
I remember the endless lengths of embroidery thread and the quiet evenings when my mother and I embroidered together, sometimes without saying a single word.
I remember the cold metal box of filmstrips. We would take it out, choose one of the little rolls of film and settle down with my friends in the dark corridor. Images would appear on the wall, one after another and for a while an ordinary corridor stopped being a corridor.
I remember the swing I could sit on for hours, alone. Almost nothing was happening around me, and perhaps that was precisely why so much was happening: the movement forward, the movement back, the air, the silence, and that strange state of childhood when time does not yet exist.
I remember the enormous piece of land my parents bought. It was overgrown with grass and seemed endless to me.
Everything was bigger in childhood: rooms, trees, distances, summer. Perhaps because we ourselves were small. Or perhaps because we had not yet learned to measure the world.
And I remember my first red patent-leather bag. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me. But something entirely new happened when I had it: for the first time, I felt like a girl. Not because someone told me I was. I saw myself that way.
Memory does not preserve our lives whole.
It chooses a few things and leaves them inside us.
And then many years pass and suddenly we understand: what seemed to have disappeared had been with us all along.
/ without skin, but with a spine /
Once, some friends asked me:
"When you play a concert, don’t you feel as if you’re standing in front of people completely naked?"
I answered almost without thinking:
"Not naked. I’m without skin."
Perhaps this is one of the most accurate ways I can describe what it means to me to be an artist.
I don’t want to learn to be less sensitive.
I need things to affect me.
Someone else’s silence. A photograph found by chance. A smell from childhood. Music. Something someone said years ago. A person who never existed, yet somehow left traces in my memory.
I need to be able to descend into the places where it becomes frightening.
To pull memories to the surface, even though sometimes I’m afraid of what I might remember.
To make Marcus and keep returning to an almost impossible question: how can someone who never existed leave behind a memory?
To stand in front of people without hiding behind the complexity of an idea, an intellectual construction, or a beautiful explanation of what I do. To begin a painting without the slightest idea of where it will end.
To risk.
Not to know.
And still keep going.
For a long time, I thought the opposite of this kind of vulnerability must be strength. That I needed to become someone who was harder to hurt.
Now I think the opposite.
If one day things stop affecting me, I will lose something essential in the place my work comes from.
So my task is not to grow thicker skin.
I need a different structure.
An enormous permeability, and something very strong inside it.
Boundaries.
The ability to say no.
The ability to leave.
The ability to withstand being misunderstood.
The ability to show a work that may not be accepted.
The ability to hear criticism without losing the sound of my own voice.
The ability to remain open without giving all of myself to everyone who reaches out a hand.
Because openness does not mean having no boundaries.
And vulnerability does not mean having no form.
I find this structure far more interesting than the idea of becoming a “strong person” whom nothing can touch.
An artist needs to be affected.
Otherwise, something essential disappears from the place where the work begins.
You simply don’t have to fall apart at every touch.
You can remain without skin.
But with a spine.