Story behind the Award

"As a small girl I used to play in mud puddles and on a big heaps of dirt. Our favorite game was the cooking game, in which boys made dishes and girls made dumplings. When mothers called children to have their lunches, everybody ran home, but I stayed – sitting on top of the heap of dirt and watching the sun crawl forward across the sky. These were striking moments, which I loved.

The years of playing with mud were soon over and suddenly it was time to go to school. It was something new to me, and I couldn’t get used to the fact that I should obey all those strange people. Gradually, I found new friends and became interested in all sorts of things. I learned to play the piano and the flute, to sew and knit.

In art class, I began to work with different materials, and while squashing the colored plastic thing called "modurit," I was thinking about my heaps of dirt and mud. I almost started to forget about them when a teacher brought a new material into class. It reminded me of the mud that sticks to your shoes – it was my heap, dipped in water. I was modeling everything that came to my mind. Each time I finished a work, I was excited that I could actually do something like this. I felt like a creator and presented my works to my friends, which made me even more excited than them.

In my thoughts I’m coming back to a heap of my happiness that revealed itself to me. I’ve been working with clay for five years now. I’ve met both people who had the chance to hold it in their hands and those who had not. I rather give it to the latter. I found a heap of my happiness, and I wouldn’t like to lose it.

P.S. I forget to mention the most important thing. I’m a blind girl and my eyes are hidden in my palms. One cannot see through them but feel. What I’m trying to say is that you should let blind people look, even if they look by touching everything.