“We are all part of nature, that is part of our life and, as such, it is inside and not outside our body. Let’s try and think how the lunar phases influence our being women. Not feeling part of this splendid rhythm is absurd. I have a predilection for rituals, such as slicing a piece of ginger. It doesn’t take all that much to feel good”.
The conversation with Michele Oka Doner, the American artist with a delicate sensitivity and surprising force of expression, is the kind that remains inside; that reveals the most recondite paths of existence; that open wide a way of being and living where everything is perfectly amalgamated and harmoniously balanced.
And where joy, stupor, observation and discipline give shape to a stylistic lexicon and an everyday wellbeing that pour out, with an ancestral elegance, in every gesture, in every word and, obviously, in every creation that originates from her white and elongated hands.
Museums have been collecting her treasures for a long time now: the works of art that often have mythological or poetic names today are at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, at the Chicago Art Institute, at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
But art, for Oka Doner, is also a means for sharing with the viewer the serenity and multiform surprises offered by nature. For this reason, for years she has been active in creating works in public spaces, «that make me part of a great tradition dating back to pre-historical graffiti».
Grazia d’Annunzio, Vogue Italia, June 2013, n. 754, p.142