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There's no one in today's art scene as relevant and inspiring than the multi-talented Marie Cartier. In early February I had the distinct honor of interviewing Ms. Cartier, as she was awarded "Artist of the Year" by BeautyandtheBabyArt.com, my art gallery for women artists. Below is part one of our interview on living the artist's life.
Who is Marie Cartier?
Me! That’s a good question …Who I’ve been is many things…a woman trying to live my life with as much integrity as possible. And then I’m a lot of other things that came along the path as I’ve been living it.
I’m an artist, a visual artist, an installation artist, a poet, a playwright. I’ve written a lot of screen plays…and then I’ve been in graduate school getting my Ph.D. for the last decade. At the same time I did installation art and did Morgasm and also am still doing Dandelion Warrior. I’m a professor at two schools. I teach screenwriting and women’s studies. And I’m a wife. I got married to my girlfriend (last October)…
I’m a black belt. I’m the founder of the Dandelion Warrior movement. A movement for survivors of incest who make the decision not to kill themselves. All of those identities and all of those accomplishments are inside of me and some of them take different shapes depending on what’s happening along the path. With my women’s studies students, I talk about a woman’s path is often a spiral path rather than a straight line path. I think that it’s been not easy, but easier for men to say “Here’s where I am and that’s where I want to go. And if I do X, Y and Z, the chances are really good that I’ll get there.”
I don’t think that’s as easy for women…It’s like women often start one place and they spiral to another place because different things happen along the way. They get pregnant. They get married. They hit the glass ceiling… Again, I’m not saying that’s an easy trajectory for men. I think for women we have to look at success differently than we look at it for men.
How has art changed your life?
Art saved my life. Deciding that I was an artist and that I make art, that’s what made me want to not wake up hung over in my twenties. That’s the thing that channels my feelings, like my raging feelings for so many things. My first poem about incest survival was…I write about it in the introduction of “I am Your Daughter, Not Your Lover,” but my first poem about incest survival was, I want to say forty pages...and it’s this huge long thing…
When I went into healing as an incest survivor, many people find art as a way to heal. I lost my art for a while…and I really had to find my way back to who I was through finding art. For me, art is so…wound up with who I am and how I saved myself. And the horrible things that happened to me, most of it has been transformed into art. They’re still horrible things, but there’s also something between me and that horrible event, which is an art piece. So I have a different way of remembering a lot of things that happened because I’m an artist… Art saved my life. I would not have made it out of my recovery as an incest survivor without art.
(To read Part Two of our interview, click here. To read Part Three, click here.)
Photo Credit: Marie Cartier as Queen Ezmerelda in her one-woman show, "Ballistic Femme." Photo by Lisa Hartouni.
For more info: Marie Cartier, Dandelion Children poem
(Copyright © 2009-2010 N. E. Francis. All Rights Reserved.)
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