Do I like to keep them separate? Absolutely. That, I think, is also that left side/right side of the brain thinking, which I go back and forth on. They're very, very different forms of tapping into the creative processes, and I love both. But you also have to literally get the mechanics of every sentence and every paragraph and every chapter. Of course it is an art as well, and you have to make sure the main theme is working. It's a singularity of thought that has to be pure and has to be strong, whereas architecture is more like writing a novel. For me, making art is like writing a poem. And I study and I research and I research and I study, and then I try to forget consciously all that I have learned. I tease out some underlying goals before I ever try to imagine what the shape or the form is going to be. That's something that has been a part of my work from day one. I tend to balance between left side and right side of the brain thinking. That's something that happens throughout my work. Public monuments that are exceedingly private. It's things that, again, you might not be considering. How can I make a rock feel lightweight? How do I make a rock wall look transparent? It's opposites. I like being on the border of things I like to live right on the boundary between opposing things. That happens throughout my body of work, where there are real dichotomies ambivalence. You begin to flip the private into the public realm. I think that's very unusual for someone who works in fairly large, very outdoor, very public spaces. I always try to focus back to the personal, the individual, the one-on-one. If any art form, anything, gets us to take a moment's pause and look at something afresh, that's got to be a good thing. Whether you become an artist or not, I think we all will benefit from letting art teach us how someone else looks at something, how someone reacts to something, how sometimes you can't quantifiably understand what art is doing. It's a voice, it's a language, it's a way of expressing ourselves. I'm almost heartbroken that we've taken art out of primary education in schools. Getting us to see the world around us in a new light is a key part of my definition of innovation. In order to protect it, you have to see it in its entirety. So I started a whole series on rivers that tries to get you to think of a river as a living unified organism. What's upstream? People focus on what they can see. Based on ecological terms, what's downstream from you? None of my concern. We tend to pollute what we don't see and what we don't own. If I look at a river, I look at the entire length of the river. For instance, a lot of my artworks focus on the environment. I like to debunk simple assumptions, sometimes about the everyday. Innovation could be everything from pure invention to getting us to look at materials that we think we know and getting people to rethink. ON INNOVATION AND CHANGING PERSPECTIVE To see some of Maya Lin's work, visit her website. In her own words, Lin discusses her creative process and the "tripod" nature of her body of work. She is currently at work on her final memorial What Is Missing?, a multiplatform piece which will call attention to current environmental issues. Whether designing sculpted outdoor earthworks or private residences, Lin reinterprets the world around us into visually stunning, intellectually compelling pieces. Throughout her career, she has moved fluidly between the realms of art, architecture, and memorials, maintaining a steady focus on the landscape and environment. A native of Athens, Ohio, Lin went on to earn her master's degree in architecture from Yale in 1986, and has received numerous prizes, awards, and honorary doctorates, including the National Medal of Arts in 2009. Photo by Betsy HenningĪt age 21, while still an undergraduate at Yale University, Maya Lin shot to fame when she won the design competition (supported by NEA funding) for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Maya Lin working on the Confluence Project, a series of artworks near the Columbia River Basin in Washington State, along the Lewis and Clark Trail.
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