Awilda Sterling-Duprey, …blindfolded

Narrator: Artist Awilda Sterling-Duprey:

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: I have always been very curious and very into impulsive, something attracts me and I don’t ask for permission or whatever. I just go there to see what is happening or to see is it true what I felt or what I heard.

Narrator: Sterling-Duprey performs her paintings and drawings into being. She blindfolds herself, then allows music to guide her in improvisational movements that lead to mark-making on paper, and the walls.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: I am using sound, I am following sounds, the energy of improvisation, jazz improvisation to produce those images or those traces on the paper that my body has to follow. I don’t have a sense of what I am doing at the moment, but I do know that I am enjoying what I am doing. Yes. I have to feel that I am enjoying grasping the idea and the concept.

My impression is that I have so much information in my brain, what I have been doing before, always using my body to do things, to create things, usually in large spaces, large format, that I think I don’t have to see what I am doing, because it is already there. It’s just a way of feeling where I am feeling the surfaces, listening to the sound and the noise, and the music.

I think that’s probably also very much connected to jazz. You cannot just memorize the song. You memorize the song, but you have to imbue it with your own feelings. Even when following the rules for jazz interpretation, you have to feel it first and you make it your own. And then you can improvise.