Space, Ritual, Another Community

Part of Suffolk County Community College’s Interdisciplinary Guest Lecturers Series, 1980

I have been asked to write about my work and feminism. Feminism is a description of our oppression. It is understanding the forces against which we have to struggle, naming the feelings of craziness, of no space and no permission.

Shrine for Everywoman:

A place to see ourselves and discover others.

Certainly feminism, the Women’s Movement, has been an inextricable influence on me; without it, I would have been left to believe in my isolation-personal ‘madness’, and would have muddled for a longer time in many confusions. However, I do not think about feminism when I make art. I think about my dreams, visions, fantasies, and how to make them live as visual, sensual presences. I struggle to believe in them, to find forms and space for their existence and to make a life in which I can make them real.

I first connected to feminism in 1971; I had had two babies and my art was going through radical changes. Although I had tried, I couldn’t even keep my name. In order to find a space for myself, I began to explore ‘women’s space’ by making one, a Feminist Art Studio at Cornell University. Our goal was to see what we could make, what would happen in our own space.

I began to re-educate myself, realizing that I know only about men and almost nothing about women… As I have re-educated myself, my life and art have gone through great changes. I became obsessed with new images and space. Space to feel, think, be strong, be completely female. My paintings have left the walls; I have begun to literally take space with my work.

Simultaneously I have started looking for ways to work that would connect women to each other, to themselves, their images and powerfulness. This has led me to ‘ritual’. We need to collectivize our energy to begin to make our own work; to come together outside the oppression to build a collective language. My performance/workshop work is created from these needs. It brings people together in a new space that changes consciousness for a short time. There is another reality than the one that we walk around in most of the time; I am trying to create another reality over and over again until it occupies more space.