"Geometric figures are your friends and your enemies at the same time, so you just conjure them up, draw them, and you can have a whole range of reactions to them, these certainties.  You can fight against them or you can go with them.  You know, there’s a huge amount of energy I devoted to defiling these figures, but then in the early 1970s I thought, wait a minute, I spend all this energy attacking these geometric eternals, what would happen if I would turn around and protect them from my own aggression?  This is what led to Repository for This Eternal Figure, which is the biggest piece I’ve made.  It consists of three units, each made of quarter-inch steel plate:  a sphere, a cube, and a tetrahedron.  Each is essentially a mold for the three basic geometric solids. In other words, each is a repository, the negative space for that specific pure geometric figure. […]  But later, at other times, I returned to defiling geometric forms, inflating or squeezing them, and so on.  You know, for me, it’s an eternal play."

 

-Interview with Donna De Salvo, 2013

 

 

"I’m interested in the authority that’s coming from the geometric figures. I respect geometry because our whole culture is based on the rationality embodied in these figures. But while I respect geometry, there is another side of me, the anarchist or the destructive side of my personal craziness that wants to fight against this authority. World View is a destructive act against a circle. Inside of a triangle there is a circle being deformed by a bolt, it’s destroying the perfect geometric figure to make something else. It looks like a bean, or a seed, or the beginning of life, a fertilized egg. I’m interested in all the interpretations that you can give it. In my very earliest drawings, the gesture fights against the edge of the format.  In the etching we are making, the line is fighting against the authority of the square. It’s a hopeless thing, because the authority is absolute. Nevertheless, I like crashing against the edges. You know you will always lose, but what’s beautiful is the fight against authority.

 

"I want to be the aggressor and the protector at the same time. I want to take both positions. In a way, I want to be in control of the whole question."

 

-Excerpts from an Interview with Sara Fumagalli, 2018