WEBVTT

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[Leonardo Drew: Traveling & Making]

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[Vigo Gallery, London]

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Okay, what kind of questions do you guys have?

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I mean, I don't know too much about...

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Stowe School, right?

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So you guys are what year? What year is this?

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[STUDENT] Lower 6

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[DREW] Lower 6? What is that?

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[MAN] That's 17, basically.

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[DREW] Seven...

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[MAN] 17.

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[DREW] Oh, okay.

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I actually didn't get out...

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I didn't realy get outside too often.

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Only recently, I've been traveling

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and moving, and taking in new information.

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So, I think that if you allow your

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antennas to sort of, like, reach out,

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you'll find... you know, like,

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what it is you need for this part of your
journey.

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You know?

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So I've been traveling a lot.

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Just recently, I returned from Lima, Peru,

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and did the Nazca Lines.

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Visiting, like, Cuba,

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and Madrid, and Switzerland,

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and all those things were done back to back--

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one after the other.

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It was a realization that I could spend

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that much time out of the studio

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and not miss the studio,

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because life was going on

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and art was going on within me.

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The art is fed by experiences.

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Traveling and digesting things,

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and allowing these things to sort of

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influence your body.

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I know with all certainty

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that all aspects of your body is a receiver
of information.

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The way the light reflects off of things.

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The way the wind blows or doesn't blow.

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I mean, all these things have an effect on
you.

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I'm a visual artist,

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so it's going to find its way out, you know,

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into the world through my medium.

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It says here--

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to my grandmother from me--

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it says, "Towards the end of my stay in Japan..."

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Wow, this is from my trip to Japan.

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"I'm at the airport waiting to go to Okinawa."

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"It's been an interesting three months."

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"First week, I was invited to dance with the
older women of the village."

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"Some of them must have been pushing close
to to 110 years old..." [LAUGHS]

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"But man, they could dance!" [LAUGHS]

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One of the places that I always wanted to
visit was Japan.

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I have no idea why that was so in my body
that I had to know this place.

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But, in 1997, I had the opportunity to go.

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"This part of Japan is colored with real soul."

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"I chopped sugar cane and ate pig feet." [LAUGHS]

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"Now that's soul food."

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When I was in Japan, I was looking at

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how to make color by natural means.

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"The colors on the beach were surreal."

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"The water was both green and blue."

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"The sand: white, white, white."

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That was what I went there to physically learn.

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But, what I was there actually spiritually
learning

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was a whole other thing.

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And what inevitably ended up in the work,

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with certainty, had to do with some of the
papermaking

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that I was studying there;

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ended up in the piece that I was doing at
Fabric Workshop.

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And, even though I had not come to any conclusions
when I was in Japan,

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I knew that was a door that I had opened

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that had to be explored.

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So there's always these constant opportunities
to learn.

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As a receiver of information,

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I want to take in as much as possible.

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I want to learn as much as possible.

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And I want to give back as much as possible.

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If you're open, then you can continue on this
journey forever.