Melissa Sweet: Hello. My name is Melissa Sweet, and I am the co-author and illustrator of Unbound: The Life and Art of Judith Scott. It was a number of years ago, I heard of Judith Scott through a colleague, a librarian. What makes the story of Judith Scott so fascinating is not just her circumstances, which is the fact that she was born a twin with Down syndrome, she was deaf and non-verbal, but how she came to make art. Judith went to an institution, and, for the next 40 some odd years, that's where she lived until her twin sister decided it was time for Judith to come live with her, that they could do better than this institution. And when she came to California in the 1970s, at that time the Americans with Disabilities Act was coming into play, and, in California, there was a law stating that people with mental, physical, and emotional disabilities deserve the right to not just live on their own in a group home or wherever, but also to express themselves.

So now I'd like to talk a little bit about the making of the art for Unbound. Right at the beginning of the book on the title page, I begin to set the stage where the materials I thought would have interested Judith or, certainly, interested me and the color choices, the materials, the spools of yarn and ribbons and little colored balls, the pieces of wood, just sort of setting the stage for the whole book. There's a moment in everyone's life when they had their idea or turning point for instance, and, in Unbound, there's the moment that Judith begins to make art. That was the spread I wanted to show. It's really the most powerful one for me. It's very simple, but we see a spool of thread, and then we see some sticks, and she's begun to wrap fibers and materials around a few of these willow sticks.

My choice was to make this three-dimensional. You're actually looking at a photograph of the beginnings of my sculpture for this spread, and it's a photograph because the materials are so three-dimensional. They're sticks and yarn and it's about an inch and a half thick. It can't be scanned so the photographs show the shadows of the sticks. And I love this moment because, no doubt, there was a moment where the teacher spread these materials out and Judith picked them up and began to make her first sculpture. This book has brought home for me, we need more work in granting people with disabilities their humanity. And how we move in the world, the physical world, is very easy for all of us who are able-bodied, but, for people with disabilities, there's an opportunity to make it more accessible.