MARY DIGNAN

Woodstock’s Garden, 16 x 16

 Black and white tuxedo cat sits to left in a garden of fanciful red and orange flowers, with little glass butterflies hovering over them, and a blue sky full of a bright yellow sun that shows the Peanuts character Woodstock looking down over the garden.

1. Tell us about your background. Do you feel your culture or upbringing informs your artwork?

I was born deaf in 1954, but my deafness was not diagnosed until I was 4 1/2 years old. Before the deafness was diagnosed, my parents were told I was mentally retarded and probably had other psychotic issues. My parents got me hearing aids and mainstreamed me into kindergarten. I was going to school with kids my own age who were a lifetime ahead of me in language skills. I caught up, graduated from high school in the top 15% of my class, went on to get my bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University in 1976, and embarked on a career that included news reporting, legislative work for the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC, and the California State Assembly Agriculture Committee in Sacramento. I also worked for a major water management agency, did public relations and legislative analysis, earned my Juris Doctor with distinction from law school in 1994, and began practicing water, environmental, public agency, and disability law.

At this point, I should back up a little bit. When I was a junior in college in 1975, a routine eye check-up for reading glasses revealed that I had retinitis pigmentosa. RP is a degenerative retinal disease that causes night blindness, tunnel vision, and eventually total blindness. At the time of my diagnosis, I could still see very well, although my visual field was beginning to tunnel in.

By the time I started law school in 1990, I was down to 8° of tunnel vision and wearing two high-powered hearing aids. When I finished school, I was down to 4° of vision. I was still seeing fairly well within that small tunnel. When I started practicing in 1994, I had not driven since 1989, and was starting to use a white cane and an FM system to augment my hearing aids.

2. What motivated you to become an artist? What inspires your work?

Regarding question number two, it is hard to remember a time when I was not doing something artistic. I particularly liked working with fabric, yarn, and embroidery as a kid, and my first serious art love was fabric art. I would make intricate stitcheries, art, quilts, and advocate for my work. I loved to sew and cook. I did a lot of macramé, papier-mâché, and experimented with various art projects. I think that if someone is truly artistic, even if they can’t draw, that artistic inclination will show up somehow, whether it is in the way they arrange flowers on their table or adjust the seasonings in a favorite dish they like to make. It just comes out. For me, my creative zone is my favorite place to be.

3. Have you ever integrated topics of identity/race/social justice in your art? If so, how?

I use mirror shards so that my work reflects whoever is looking at it, in a way my work also reflects issues that are relevant and meaningful to the viewer.

4. In what way(s) do you feel art has the power to create change?

Regarding question four and how art can encourage change, I think my personal choice and medium, mosaics, can be especially transformative because mosaics are made up of different pieces, many of them broken, to create a new unit. I think that is what we are—we are all individuals with many aspects, even contrary ones, and yet they are all a part of us. As a disabled person, it can be especially transformative to deal with broken pieces. At least it was for me. I started doing mosaics after my brain tumor surgery, during a time when I felt so completely broken. I remember one piece where I was trying to get the broken pieces of a white and gold plate to work into a spiral. The pieces kept getting jostled and rearranging themselves into a star. So I finally said, “Well, be that way,” and made it into a star.

The lesson I learned from that piece was that sometimes that is how life works. Sometimes you just have to go with the break and let the pieces rearrange and create themselves into something new. Instead of pieces of a broken plate that I was trying to make look like a broken plate glued back together, I ended up with a new star. I called that piece my Phoenix Star, as it kind of arose out of my own ashes.

Not all art is transformative, and not all art is significant either. It can be trivial. It can even be just one big mess, but it is all part of the process of living and learning to live well anyway.

Small Mosaic, Big Heart, 9 x 9

Ivory stained glass background with spiral heart made of blue and  red glass shards, ball chain, and red glass gems.

In 1997, after I had been practicing law for only three years, I found out that I had a brain tumor. It was an acoustic neuroma in my right ear and was the reason my balance was wacko and I seemed to be losing a lot of hearing very fast. The surgery to remove the tumor severed my cochlear nerve in my right ear and severely damaged my facial nerve and the nerve controlling the production of lubricating tears. In short, it complicated both my hearing and vision problems to the extent that I had to retire and go on disability.

So California lost a lawyer but gained a mosaic artist. I started doing mosaics while I was recovering from my surgery, and as my vision continued to decline, I learned to adapt my technique. Today, even though I am almost totally blind with no sense of color and only some high contrast sight, I can still do my mosaics using my tactile sense and using sighted help to make sure my colors are sorted and the quality of my work is up to my standards.

I grew up in a small farming community in California’s San Joaquin Valley. My mother was a Southern Protestant belle from Brownsville, Texas, and my father was an Irish Catholic Yankee from Boston, so it was an interesting household. I did not grow up bilingual, but I did grow up very familiar with Mexican food and Mexican culture, or rather Southwestern border culture. The California farm town I grew up in was racially diverse and economically stratified.

Most of my mosaics incorporate mirror shards. I want people to look at my mosaics and see themselves or a part of themselves in my work. Apart from the fact that the mirror shards are sparkly and add an element of surprise and interesting depth to my work, I’d like to think that my work can appeal and be meaningful to anyone, regardless of who they are.

The BikeTriptych, each piece 48 x 32 (Commisoned)

        First piece shows racing mirro shard bikes going downhill, foreground of sunflowers made of ceramic and glass beads, big sky of shilling glass gem spiral clouds.  Second piece features large mirrored bike on the home stretch, and final piece shows triumphant biker with hands reaching up to spiral sun made of ballshain, gold mirror shards and bike chains.

6. Can you describe how your path in art making and art process became accessible to you?

My mosaic technique evolved in two different ways. First, the basic skills I developed because I loved ceramic and mosaic floors, and I learned how to install ceramic floors and counters, developing the basic skills there. I learned new techniques mainly by experimentation and need. For example, I needed a more precise tactile way to apply adhesive, and when I discovered adhesive tile caulk that I could manipulate with my hands and apply in a small stream to each individual piece, that was the answer to being able to control the process tactilely without much vision. Another example is working on an intricate piece and trying to figure out how I could get a ceramic flower to stay in one spot while I built around it, and I came up with the idea of using air-dry clay to secure the test and adjust the level.

I also had to learn how to explain what I wanted to a sighted person to get the kind of help I needed. For example, I quickly learned to ask certain friends with a good sense of color to help me find the colors I wanted to use. Not everybody knows the difference between blue-green and turquoise! I had to learn how to translate what I was looking for into something that somebody else could understand so they could find it for me.

My whole process changed as my vision continued to decline. I used to be able to walk into my studio and through my little tunnel of vision, when I could still see, try things out visually by looking at them and putting things together. I don’t have enough vision to do that anymore. Now I have to imagine it, and I have to imagine how it would look in my mind. The blinder I get, the more complex my pieces become, I think this is because when I am imagining the piece, I am also working out in my head exactly how I am going to construct it. Even though I’m lousy at math, I think I probably would have made a really good engineer!

7. What is your disability, how do you identify, and how does your disability inform your artistic process and lens?

I am basically a blind artist. As I said, I was born deaf and wore hearing aids, and today I am stone deaf in one ear and hear with a cochlear implant in my other ear. Because of my visual limitations, I work very tactilely, and my art is very tactile.

Sun and Shadow, 24 x 18

Sun face made of ceramic and glass shards and glass gems, against night blue stained glassy, with rising crescent teal moon made of ceramic tile.

8. What was your favorite art lesson as a K-12 student?

I guess my favorite art “lesson” in school was papier-mâché. I don’t know what it was about tearing up paper, slathering it with some sort of paste or glue, and creating stuff out of it, but I totally got into it and became very good at it. I remember one Christmas my family decided to do a partridge in a pear tree theme, and we had a big mulberry tree in our front yard. So I taught my brothers how to make papier-mâché pears using balloons. We made dozens and dozens of papier-mâché pears, painted them, and hung them in that mulberry tree, and I made a huge partridge too. It looked great until it rained. Other than papier-mâché, I loved to sew and was very good at it. I even learned how to make my own patterns and make things that were tailored, as well as curtains and upholstery.

9. What is one message you want to give to art educators to make art-making more accessible?

The one message to give to an art educator to make art more accessible? That’s a hard one. I think maybe it would be to allow the possibility. Instead of assuming someone with a disability can’t do something, why not assume that the person might be able to figure out another way to do it? Maybe they can’t hold a paintbrush, but they can definitely finger paint. Maybe using a different type of paint or glue that works better. And I think it’s important to let a mess be a mess. Sometimes art is not really art but more a process, and messes are part of the process.

10. What is one message you want to give to art students across the neurodiverse spectrum?

My message to an art student? Well, I think it is the one that I give to all my students when I teach my mosaic technique. And that is: you can do this. You do have art in you. Even if you can’t draw, the point is you don’t have to. The best thing you can do is to simply enjoy yourself and see what happens.

  Interview by Dr. Reji Mathew , 

                                                                                                                                           ARAT Arts Accessibility Advocate

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MOSAIC ARTIST, MARY DIGNAN : 

FACEBOOK:   Mary Dignan WEBSITE: MaryDignanMosacis - (access on safari browser)