Carolina QuotesNow, your great fear in art is that it's never guaranteed you're going to get that next idea. And there's always the fear that the idea you just made that you really, really love, you'll never be able to do it again.
Maya Lin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
"Public Affairs Television "Becoming American" Interview with Maya Lin (Part 1) in PBS (2003)
- form
- interview
- year
- 2003
Cite this record
“Now, your great fear in art is that it's never guaranteed yo…” Maya Lin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1B4AB88578. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1b4ab88578
More from Maya Lin
I tend to make models of a lot of my pieces. I end up making models, and the models get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I call it the Christmas tree syndrome. You buy a Christmas tree outdoors, you think it’s too small, then you bring it inside and you have to lop two feet off because it’s way too big. If you’re working out of doors, you have to test actual scale, with a paper cutout, with a maquette at full scale, because you need it to feel intimate like a dining table. You have to scale it up just enough so that it will still feel intimate — so it won’t jump to monumental in scale. It has to be bigger than it would be inside because then it would get dwarfed. You can only do that by actually mocking it up.
There are a couple of things out there that I really want to do. I’ll tell you one. I want to work in a landfill. I love things that involve adaptive reuse of really degraded places. The sad thing about our current landfills are, you can’t dig a hole into them, because heaven forbid, there’s all this toxic stuff in there. It’s not just that I want to work in a landfill. I would like to help rethink what a landfill could be. What if we didn’t put anything toxic in? What if we composted all our organic matter? So then it wouldn’t be dangerous to plant a tree in it, you wouldn’t have to cap it because you think there’s so much poison in there. What if we could recycle all our rare-earth metals and minerals? It’s a big ask. That’s something I want to do in my lifetime.
I try to understand the "why" of a project before it's a "what." And this might be more pertinent to some of my memorial projects. Memorials are a hybrid between art and architecture because they have a function.