"I have notebooks full of portraits and caricatures of all the characters on TV. There was a drawer in a silk cabinet where my mother kept two handfuls of photographs, tied with string and full of dust. I looked at them carefully. Serious looks , people dressed for Sunday. Men, women, families. People of all ages who posed in artificial settings. And their hands always caught my attention, because they were the hands of well-dressed working people to immortalize themselves.
The old materials, recycled from waste , or trunks, or forgotten attics, help me tell the stories, because they are the ones who tell their own stories and I am the one who helps them.
Burlap sackcloth that has been used to carry carob beans or almonds, shirts worn by the people I am portraying, old boxes that have taken fruit to markets, or disused shoes, or hoe handles, or hooks for hanging baskets, or dozens of objects recovered from storage rooms to give them a second life, a recognition of their work. Hanging them on dining room walls to form part of a work of art is more than recognition of a lifetime of work."
