My Sculpture at the Toledo Museum of Art

Updated: Oct 21, 2023

As a writer and translator, sometimes it's helpful every once in awhile to step away from the page, exercise a different artistic muscle.

With my plaster sculpture, titled "Otobiography" and created during a body casting workshop earlier this spring, I wrestled with some of the same ideas as those I have worked and reworked in my in-progress manuscript, but this new form pushed me to articulate them differently. How thrilling, then, to be able to share my creation with audiences at the Toledo Museum of Art this past weekend, as part of their collaboration with the Disability EmpowHer Network. Not just because the Toledo Museum of Art holds a special place in my heart (see my review of their 2016 exhibition Shakespeare's Characters: Playing the Part). To exhibit a piece of visual art allowed me to engage with the artistic process in a more immediate way, witnessing the impact of my ideas as visitors absorbed them. I like to think I write to be in conversation with readers, translate to be in dialogue with a text (and then, if I'm fortunate, with readers), but it's an imperfect back-and-forth, carried on over gulfs of time and space. If the manuscript informed the sculpture, the experience of making and showing the sculpture will most certainly inform the manuscript.