[water, wind, birds]
[bee buzzes, dog's collar and tags clink]
- Wendy Maruyama: Talking about my deafness and disability
has never been really easy,
but I realize, as time has gone on,
that... my being deaf was probably the first identity
that I consciously was aware of.
And I have cerebral palsy.
At the age of four,
I was going to speech therapy, physical therapy.
And then, of course, being Japanese American.
We were the only Asian American kids on the block.
Then, there was the issue of being a female
in a male-dominated field.
So, it's a pretty unique identity.
I mean, you know, how many deaf, cerebral palsy,
Asian American women and woodworker
in woodworking do you know?
[music playing]
Being a furniture maker has really added
a great deal of ammunition and depth to my work.
[music playing]
I learned woodworking at San Diego State.
The methods that we used were free-thinking,
and the forms were very organic.
The furniture really didn't look like furniture.
And I think that's what really attracted me to the field.
- Deirdre Visser: Women have been denied access for decades
from the traditional woodshop.
And then, in the early seventies,
we see this emergence of a lot of graduate programs
in the arts and in craft skills,
where women started to enter those.
- Wendy Maruyama: When I went to grad school,
I was challenged by what they taught,
dovetails, and mortise, and tenons.
I hadn't learned any of those things.
- Deirdre Visser: You were one of a very small number of women
in your shop in graduate school.
- Wendy Maruyama: I felt like we women
had to be three times more amazing
to even be counted.
- Deirdre Visser: At what point did you free yourself from that?
- Wendy Maruyama: When I painted a piece of furniture
and then people were saying, "What are you doing?"
I wasn't part of that group
using light brown, medium brown, and dark brown. {Wendy laughs]
I had blue and yellow and red.
[music playing]
- Deirdre Visser: Wendy reached a level of mastery,
saw the boundaries of technique,
and kept pushing beyond them.
- Wendy: I've been invited to do a show about Bauhaus furniture.
The parameter of the show
was to design a piece
that was inspired by that movement.
The challenge was
that I wasn't particularly fond of Bauhaus,
but I've always loved the work of Anni Albers,
who was a weaver.
Bauhaus had limited women to only the weaving program.
I was struck by her use of color,
and I decided,
instead of making a piece of furniture,
I would just make a wooden weaving.
It's important to try different things.
- Deirdre Visser: When I look at Wendy's work,
what excites me is not a signature style.
It really is her curiosity.
It is the ways in which she feels confident to break rules.
Wendy is exploring all of those ways that wood holds meaning
and that furniture as a form can hold meaning.
- Wendy Maruyama: Shake.
Such a good dog.
Hey, don't look at the camera.
- Bill Schairer: Wendy, who is a university professor,
teaching furniture design, and part of that process
is giving critiques, and so, if I cook dinner,
I always feel like I'm being critiqued
like I'm doing a master's thesis or something.
"How many cloves of garlic did you put in this?"
- Adam John Manley: The thing that she instilled in me
and generations of students
is this kind of, "Don't ever settle on the thing
"that you just did as the... as the final product.
Like, keep pushing that."
[typing]
- Wendy Maruyama: All my life, I've loved animals.
But what man does
is causing the wildlife population to decline rapidly.
I knew I wanted to make a full-sized elephant,
but I knew that if I made it the normal way out of wood,
it would be really heavy and hard to move.
I came up with the idea
of cutting the wood into very thin pieces,
and then, sewing them together
to create the three-dimensional quality of the animal.
[music playing]
The knots that are holding the elephant together
became a metaphor
for trying to fix the problem of poaching.
That's one of the beauties of craft, actually,
this balance between the message and the material.
[music playing]
[elephant trumpets]
One of the wooden elephants
represented an orphan that I adopted in Kenya.
I fell in love with this little elephant
whose mother was killed.
Sonje is now living in a reserve.
It just represents hope,
in terms of how these elephants can thrive.
[music playing]
I feel like I'm an emerging artist again.
You can't go back in time age-wise,
but I think creatively, I feel like, you know,
I'm young again,
and I'm doing this new work.