Even if I am simply one more woman laying one more brick in the foundation of a new and more humane world, it is enough to make me rise eagerly from my bed each morning and face the challenge of breaking the historic silence that has held women captive for so long.

I think what's important is to give space to the range of human experience.

With my early work I got eviscerated by my male professors, and so you learned to disguise your impulses, as many women have done. And thats definitely changed.

So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

I go to make art as who I am as a person. The fact that I am a woman comes into play maybe in the kinds of things I'm interested in or in the way I structure a canvas.

In the beginning, the feminine principle was seen as the fundamental cosmic force. All ancient peoples believed that the world was created by a female Deity... female deities were gradually overshadowed by or incorporated into the attributes of a number of male gods, then eclipsed by the ascendance of the single male deity that dominates the Judeo-Christian tradition.