My first political series was very personal. In 1988 my husband Rudy was kicked in the head by a bull calf. An hour or so later I found him on his back in the field, bleeding and unconscious. Three months later, when it was clear he would come through okay, I decided to cast a series of eight paper cowskulls to get at the emotions of finding him that way. As I began bashing and bloodying the paper skulls, I found myself overcome with much deeper emotions than I had expected. For the next three days I worked with the skulls to unearth buried experiences of sexual abuse. When the skulls were finished, I brought them to my computer and typed my associations to the imagery that had arisen. It was an astonishing process. Without any conscious intention, I had drawn from Northwest Coast Indian mythology, the story of Icarus and Daedulus, Kabuki theater, Jungian theory, and Christian iconography. The skulls and the writings became the centerpiece of an exhibition. At the opening I invited others who had been sexually abused as children to stand up with me while I read a statement asking the audience to look at us: women, old and young, from every background, their mothers, sisters, wives, lovers. One woman later told me that after standing with me, her lifelong migraines stopped. “The personal is political” has become a cliché, yet it captures a truth. The word re-member embodies the image of re-growing missing parts, arms, legs, hearts. In my case, I re-grew my voice. Before the cowskulls, I had felt inconsequential, unable to effect change. Afterwards, speaking out, both in my art and in the rest of my life, has become an almost involuntary response. The issues of feminism, the environment, and the situation in Israel and Palestine all find their way into my art.  I work with both my own handmade paper as well as paper made by others, for pieces ranging from large sculpture to artist’s books. Generally I have approached the paper in three ways: casting it, starching it, and using it as a substrate for Xerox and Polaroid imagery. When casting, I form the paper Japanese-style, press it, and lay it over a plaster mold or over found objects such as the original cow skull. Even fairly thin casts can be very strong. I also create three-dimensional moulds using cheesecloth and saplings, pour in fiber mixed with neri, then pull off the cloth when the paper is dry. When I want to form flat sheets into three-dimensional semi-rigid draped forms, I coat the paper with tapioca starch. For more supple effects, I use konnyaku, the traditional Japanese starch. In 1993, I mounted a large installation called “Grown Women Die of It”. I had tried to locate my next door neighbor Stephanie, whose father had abused us both, and found out she had committed suicide many years before. For the installation, I made a complete head-to-toe plaster cast of a woman and brushed on one layer of Japanese-style paper so that the paper cast could be easily crushed. Several of these crushed and folded casts lined the wall of the installation space. In the center was an altar with photos of Stephanie and me as children and pictures of Ann Sexton, Marilyn Monroe, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom were probably abused as children. I wrote a letter to Stephanie on one wall; one wall had space for those who had been abused and survived to sign their names; another had space for the names of those who had been abused but did not survive. My piece was one of many in a former department store in downtown Vancouver, just blocks from the city’s toughest neighborhood. The regular art crowd attended as well as school children, shoppers, and street people. When the show closed, the walls were a dense graffiti of names and moving stories. For another piece, “Pavilion of the Lost Children,” I found myself collecting photographs of children: Native American, Black, Rom, Jewish, Palestinian, and Tibetan. These were kids whose people have been ravaged by prejudice and hatred. I photocopied these photos in random layers on top of each other onto handmade paper and this became the visual text of an accordion book. On the back I listed both these groups of children and others: “pimped children,” “street children,” “children put to death by the state.”  I sewed toddler-sized dresses and pants out of large sheets of Korean-style paper. For the pavilion, I tied stout maple shoots together into a mold the shape of a hipped roof. When I could not fit the pavilion through my gallery doorway, I installed it in my woods. I rested the book on a swing hung from the pavilion roof and tied the kids’ clothing into the fir trees around it. In 1984 I visited San Pablito, Mexico, to photograph the Otomi Indians making amate. While there, I visited a shaman and bought a set of the cutout figures he makes for healing ceremonies. He cuts the good figures from dark paper. They have bare feet and every possible fruit and vegetable growing from their outstretched arms. He cuts figures with big Spanish boots from white paper. These are the liars, the cheats, the ones who steal your food while you sleep. When the shaman included The Jew in the list of bad figures, I was stunned speechless. San Pablito is a tiny Indian village. There are no Jews. Though I had read a book about amate and its uses, I had managed to forget the presence of the Jew in the Otomi pantheon of evil.  In my hotel that night I wrote a poem about this experience. As painful and confusing as it was, I was also aware of the numerous anousim, forcibly converted Jews, who accompanied the Spanish to the new world, hoping to escape the Inquisition. Unfortunately, the Spanish brought it with them. I wondered whether these Jews, after being driven from their homes, took part in suppressing another culture and forcing the Indians off their land. Back home, I was working on an artist’s book based on this poem when Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an ultra-orthodox Jew who wanted to derail the Middle East peace process. I made an insert in the original book speaking of the pain of the sibling rivalry between Muslims and Jews, the children of Abraham. I then created an altar to house the book and called the piece “Altar de los Desterrados.” Desterrado, in ungrammatical English, means dis-landed, separated from one’s home place. On the starched paper on the cover I printed the kaddish, the Jewish prayer said at times of mourning.  A few years later, after a trip to Israel and the West Bank, I made three paper prayer shawls. On the most overtly political of these, I adhered Polaroid transferred photos of places in both Israel and Palestine, along with a biblical story as text. The story tells of two women, both claiming the same child as their own, who went to King Solomon for a judgment. He told them to cut the child in two, knowing the real mother would renounce her claim rather than see the child torn apart. Each year Jews end the Pesach seder, the evening ritual, with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem”. In what is called the atarah, or crown, of the prayer shawl, I put the words, “Next year in a shared Jerusalem. Next year may we all be free.”  “Harvest: September 11, 2001” is my response to that terrible day. Just after 9/11, I began harvesting e-mails with words from Thich Nhat Hahn, the Dalai Lama, and others speaking for the way of peace. I photocopied newspaper photos of the planes crashing, images horrific beyond belief and yet with an unearthly beauty. Meanwhile, each day I photographed the scarlet tomatoes, red peppers, ruddy eggplants, purple corn, and bushels of apples I picked from my garden. I made a black box, covered in my own momigami and treated with Dolph’s Magic Mix (equal parts powdered graphite, alcohol, and shellac). I filled it with unbound pages: the photocopied and manipulated images of 9/11, the e-mails printed out on vellum paper, and the Polaroid transfers of my harvest.  “Let us praise the Garry Oak,” another artist’s book, is a setting of a poem I wrote about an oak species native to the Pacific Northwest. In spring, the Garry oak meadow are mille-fleur tapestries of wildflowers, home to many endangered animals and birds. This ecosystem, once prevalent, is fast disappearing since these sunny patches of heaven are easier to bulldoze and develop than steep evergreen slopes. The poem is printed on commercial vellum with another layer below carrying images of Garry oaks. The cover is thick handmade paper starched and dyed to have the look and feel of oak bark. The accordion structure, when opened and curved back on itself, stands like a small Garry oak grove. The last pages list the endangered species associated with this ecosystem. Some people classify this kind of work as merely therapy. Although it is therapeutic, I think there is more to it than that. Making art is certainly beneficial to the maker, especially when it creates a container for emotional material that would otherwise be too raw. But one of the artist’s roles is to address the unspeakable, to create bridges for others to connect with unbearable events, both personal and universal. Such art helps us live in our feelings. Artists, like shamans, use their skills to engage conflict and channel healing. In my political work, I take part in issues too large for me to effect on my own. If I can help others connect to these issues, all of us gain courage. All of us are then less alone. Together we shift our world, even just a little. There is a Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. The story goes that the creator’s perfect light was stored in large clay urns. The light was so powerful it broke the urns and shattered into sparks that are flying, even now, through the air around us. It is our job to catch the sparks and bring them together. My political pieces are my way, from my small quiet corner, to begin that tikkun.