Well, you know, all children make art, and I just simply continued
I grew up in the States, I was born in New York, until I was 14
And at that point my parents decided to leave and they went to Europe and so I went to school
I went to a normal grammar school in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
After about three and a half years I decided I wanted to go to Paris and be an artist in
Paris, that was my idea
Well I was a very rebellious person, I didn't want to be told what to do, you see
So I didn't study art
Paris was the exact opposite of what I thought it would be like
I mean, firstly, they were all men
There were very few women actually practicing or visibly practicing
And it was very, very difficult as a young 18 year old girl who wanted to be an artist
to actually be taken in any way seriously
Being a woman was... the sense is installed so totally within your body that you could
do two things
You could say, 'yes, I am body and I'm proud of it'
Or you could say, 'I'm mind, forget the body'
The cone itself is a very important female symbol
It's not male, it's feminine
When the cones osculate, the more you look at them the less you see the volume and that
was what interested me at the time, is that I was very interested in de-materialisation
The idea of losing the body, and that was related in a way to being a woman
In the middle of the 1970s I realised, actually it was after taking acid, I realised how important
it was to ground oneself in the body
And I realised just how important it was to be physical
So these three figures are self-portraits and this one's called 'Lilith', or 'Portrait
of the Artist on Fire'
I made it as an homage to all women who've had breast cancer
It's also about feminine passion
Anger, also
Anger
Fury, really
I never really was part of a group
I was interested in kinetic art but I wasn't interested in the movement of Kinetic Art
I was interested in the relationship between art and science
Science I found very poetic
I wanted to go to the root of things
I wanted to understand the essence of reality and that seemed to me to be it
I had started working with kinetic cylinders
Cylinders that were revolving
And what interested me here was looking at form in a completely new way
So instead of walking around a shape or looking at the way shape changes, what you see is
a code transmitted by light and you see every change on the surface of that cylinder
I never really had this feeling that I absolutely had to exhibit, or I absolutely had to have
a huge career
I wasn't brought up that way, maybe because I didn't go to art school
So we never thought of ourselves as earning a living, we thought of ourselves as criminals
I knew quite well a number of American beat-poets who lived at what was called the 'Beat Hotel'
I had the feeling that words generally had lost their energy, their power, particularly
the way they were used in journalism and in politics
So what I wanted to do, by actually spinning these words, was to make words become vibration
And so what I would say was, 'I want people to see sound'
I started making these clay pieces which were about holding, and one of them was cast in
Athens as an edition, with my gallery Rodeo
And I called it 'Holding Stone'
So it's really about holding matter
Keep holding it and feeling it
I have to say, the most important thing for me is the moment of awareness and focus
And so I try to make work that will allow people to, if you like, still their minds
Look at things with a different eye