10 sec reading: save or destroy
In New York I am going to have late-afternoon tea with a rather unusual artist. She works in a bank on Wall Street, but one day she had a dream: she had to go to twelve places in the world and in each place make a painting or a sculpture using material from nature.
So far she has managed to complete four of these works. She shows me photos of one of them: an Indian sculpted inside a cave in California. While she awaits the signs from her dreams, she goes on working at the bank – in that way she saves up the money to travel and fulfill her task.
I ask her why she does this.
“It’s to keep the world in equilibrium,” she answers.
“It may seem silly, but there is something tenuous that joins us all and we can make it better or worse according to how we act. We can save or destroy so much with a simple gesture that at times seems utterly useless.
“It may even be that my dreams are a lot of nonsense, but I don’t want to run the risk of not following them. For me, people are related just like a huge, fragile spider’s web. I am trying through my work to mend a part of that web.”
