[nfbmi-talk] Amazing Story

[Fred Wurtzel]

Now, I usually hate the term amazing when talking about a blind person.  This person is not amazing because of blindness.  She is simply an amazing person.  There are some photo captions at the beginning of this article which may sound a little strange, but the main body of the article is down there, so be patient.

 

Warmest Regards,

 

Fred

 

 

She can’t hear or see, but Dreyfoos grad never lost sight of calling

Posted: 2:14 p.m. Saturday, June 7, 2014

By

Carlos Frias

-

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

“No one stands in the way of her art. It’s all she sees. It’s all she focuses on.”—

Emilie’s mother, Susan Gossiaux



Was she dreaming? Was she awake?

Emilie Gossiaux found herself in total blackness.

+ She can’t hear or see, but Dreyfoos grad never lost sight of calling photo

Emilie Gossiaux working in Miami-Dade artist Daniel Arsham’s studio in 2013. (Photo

courtesty of Emilie Gossiaux)

Someone touched her hand; she pulled away. Something brushed her ear; she shook her

head. Something pierced her arm; she pulled back.

“Stop it!” she tried to yell but couldn’t unclench her teeth.

She flailed.

+ She can’t hear or see, but Dreyfoos grad never lost sight of calling photo

KEITH BEDFORD

Emilie Gossiaux, who suffered a traumatic brain injury, a stroke and multiple fractures

in her head, pelvis and leg after an

She realized she was lying down, and when she tried to get up, paralyzing pain shot

through her hips and left leg.

She couldn’t understand why everything was quiet, was pain, was dark. Everywhere

she turned, more blackness.

“Pull me out of the wall,” she finally said.

+ She can’t hear or see, but Dreyfoos grad never lost sight of calling photo

Emilie Gossiaux served guests in bowls she handmade as part of her senior art project

at Cooper Union. (Photo by Minh

Pull me out of the wall.

It’s exactly the kind of abstraction an artist would use to describe the nothingness

all around her.

Emilie didn’t know she was blind.

And no one could tell her. Because she was also deaf.

+ She can’t hear or see, but Dreyfoos grad never lost sight of calling photo

Emilie Gossiaux carved a shapeless block of wood into a dagger she said she would

use to “cut myself free” of

Art is ‘all she sees’

It has been nearly four years since Gossiaux, a Dreyfoos School of the Arts graduate,

was run over by an 18-wheeler as she biked to the art studio where she worked in

New York City.

Deaf since age 5, she was blinded and nearly killed in the accident in October 2010.

Her pelvis was crushed, her left femur shattered, her jaw wired shut, her optic nerves

severed. Doctors once feared she was “gone,” her mother recalled, beyond the reach

of medicine and of this world.

They asked to harvest her organs.

But last month, Gossiaux, 24, walked across the stage as a graduate of the prestigious

Cooper Union in New York City, where she returned last spring after intense therapy

for her body and her artistic soul.

She lives alone by choice in Manhattan with her guide dog, London, and continues

to make inspired work that others say is only a continuation of a blossoming artistic

career. Art that is not impressive because it was made by a blind-deaf artist but

regardless of it.

Because art is a powerful force for Emilie Gossiaux. An irresistible one.

“No one stands in the way of her art,” her mother, Susan Gossiaux, said. “It’s all

she sees. It’s all she focuses on.”

Art isn’t just something she makes. Art is how she speaks:

Pull me out of the wall.

Even when everything is dark, what art wants, art gets.

“Art has always been my true love,” she said. “Even if I stopped doing it for a while,

it will always find its way back into my life. It’s like something that I do naturally,

like breathing or eating or sleeping.”

Starting with childhood

comic strips

Hours after putting Emilie to bed, before going to sleep, Susan Gossiaux would check

her daughter’s room in Terrytown, La., one last time.

She often found Emilie, about 8 years old, sitting in the closet, drawing her own

comic strips by the parallel lines of moonlight shining through the blinds.

“Emilie’s always been different. I still can’t figure her out,” Susan Gossiaux said.

A series of infections in her ears as a child cost Emilie her hearing by age 5, and

she had to wear powerful hearing aids just to have marginal hearing. She hated them.

She covered her ears with her hair and when she couldn’t hear others, she preferred

them to think she was shy or aloof rather than different. She lip-read the teachers.

Susan Gossiaux, who worked as a teacher and school librarian for 39 years until retiring

last year, warned her that children would be cruel, and she would have to be prepared

for that.

“If you have a child with a disability, you have to be tough. Because the world’s

not going to say, ‘Aww …’” Susan Gossiaux said. “As long as she could draw, the world

could be chaos around her.”

Emilie emoted into her sketchbooks and painting. At 13, she applied to the famed

New Orleans Creative Center for the Arts and found a home there.

“I felt like I was with my family and friends,” Emilie wrote in an email. Because

of her limited hearing, she corresponds mostly through email and has her computer

read the messages aloud.

School was just another tool for her to develop her art. She wouldn’t go out on the

weekends and stayed after school at NOCCA to work on art projects another three,

four hours. Art was an imperative.

“I used to shut myself away in my room on weekends to paint and draw,” she said.

“I guess I didn’t have a normal teenage social life. I had a few close friends that

I would see occasionally, but I spent most of my time working on art.”

Art was not gentle. It was not the soccer coach who gives everyone a participation

trophy. Art to Emilie is Vince Lombardi’s motto on winning: everything, the only

thing.

“It was like the monster that ate her,” Susan Gossiaux said.

But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina battered the school and forced it to close. Rather

than attend a regular high school, she applied to Dreyfoos School of the Arts in

West Palm Beach and to live with a host family.

“I fought her not to go,” Susan Gossiaux said, worried for her daughter. “She left

everything behind for her art. Art was her first love.”

‘Most original artist’

at Dreyfoos

At 15, she was accepted at Dreyfoos and would stay there for the next two years.

When college recruiters came to Dreyfoos, Emilie is whom they wanted to see.

“She’s definitely the most original artist I’ve ever had the pleasure of working

with,” said Jenny Gifford, who has taught for 21 years at the school. “The way she

makes art, you can feel the force coming through.”

Gifford was consistently awestruck at the way Emilie’s mind worked. Sometimes it

was in a sculpture, sometimes in mixed media and performance art, and always in her

drawing. As a senior she wrote and performed a one-act performance where she stripped

down to her underwear onstage as she removed a sheep’s costume and dressed into a

wolf’s — a commentary on the nature and sexualization of women. A mural she painted

on a Dreyfoos wall is still displayed prominently.

“She was an awkward teenager and was willing to admit it in her work. She was revealing

herself in her work,” Gifford said. “You’re going to be seeing and reading about

her work for the rest of her life.”

No one was surprised when the school she had set her mind on — The Cooper Union for

the Advancement of Science and Art, which accepts only 30 students a year from outside

the New York area for its fully paid tuition program — offered her a spot.

She made her own art and apprenticed with renowned artists such as the Miami-born

Daniel Arsham, who designed the Orange Bowl

letters

around the new Marlins Stadium. While in New York, she also got a cochlear implant

— a sort of bionic ear — in her left ear that helped her better articulate sounds.

Still, hearing for Emilie is like trying to pick out one voice in a rowdy stadium.

The more sounds there are, the more the sounds distort and meld together.

On Oct. 8, 2010, she strapped on her helmet, jumped on her bike, and headed for Arsham’s

studio. But as she waited for the light to change on the corner of Johnson and Varick

avenues in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, an 18-wheeler turning right hopped

the curb and ran her down.

What could have been left of her? Barely a hundred pounds with quiet blue eyes and

a sweet whisper of voice versus a rumbling 80,000-pound diesel truck? She was rushed

to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, unidentifiable for all the fractures in

her face.

Her heart stopped for more than a minute. She had a stroke and slipped into a coma.

Her pelvis had to be reconstructed and her left leg was held together by metal rods

and pins. Doctors even had to temporarily remove her intestines and lay them outside

her body to give her lungs room to breathe while her body healed. Her optic nerves

were irreparably severed. Emilie was blind.

“It was a pretty horrific scene,” said Gifford, who has remained close with Emilie

and visited her at the hospital several times. “It was devastating to see her like

that.”

Learning again

— in darkness

Emilie was trapped in oblivion. Her friends and family could not communicate with

her, and so she seemed unresponsive. Doctors predicted rehabilitation would be impossible

for someone who could not communicate. They predicted she would remain in this inaccessible

vegetative state as she lived out a life in a nursing home.

But that’s when her then-boyfriend, Alan Lundgard, a fellow Cooper Union student

who lived with her, came across the method Annie Sullivan had used to communicate

with Helen Keller.

He took her hand and drew letters on her palm — an act both purposeful and artistic.

He slowly spelled out, “I love you.”

“Oh, you love me? That’s so sweet. Thank you,” she said suddenly — miraculously.

Emilie had been found.

When she asked why it was so dark — and asked to be pulled out of the wall — she

was told she was blind.

It was the only time anyone can remember seeing Emilie cry during the entire ordeal.

Over the next few months, doctors turned her cochlear implant back on and she began

the long process of learning to walk, to talk, to use her hands again in total darkness.

She would not leave New York. She was determined to regain abilities and continue

her career as a New York artist. Her mother moved in with her and her boyfriend for

a year and a half — on leave from her job after coworkers donated their vacation

time.

She was determined not to be helpless. She learned braille in seven months; it takes

most people up to two years. Before the year was out, she read her first book in

braille: Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

Ideas for art floated in the blackness around her. But she didn’t yet have the dexterity

to snatch them out of the air and make them real. (“The artist in me needed time

to heal,” she said.)

“The words ‘stop’ and ‘give up’ never occurred to me,” she said to a graduating NOCCA

class after the school reopened, “but I’d be lying if I told you I never doubted

my abilities.”

Her first attempt came about 10 months after the wreck, when a friend, curating a

show about love, asked her what it was like to fall in love.

She took out a clean white sheet of paper and — after several tries until it was

perfectly straight and fitted to the page — wrote in braille: “When everything feels

like vanilla.”

But the programs for the blind in New York were not helping her achieve the independence

she sought. So in January of 2012, she was referred to Blind Inc., a program from

the National Federation of the Blind that teaches people to live totally independent

in their surroundings. And although one of three schools that taught the program

was in her home state of Louisiana, she chose the one in Minneapolis, a city to which

she’d never been.

“I wanted to train in a city environment that could be similar to New York,” she

said.

Finding a new form of art

For the next 11 months, she lived with a roommate and learned to fend for herself

through a series of classes to encourage independence. Among the graduation requirements

were to be dropped off somewhere in the city and having to find her way back to the

center. She learned to cook for herself and even had to prepare and serve a full

meal — salad, baked bread, drinks, main course, side dish and dessert — for 30 people.

“I got used to not seeing by just listening to my gut and feeling, and I got better

at it,” she said.

More important she met George Wurtzel, a blind woodworking artist and cabinetmaker

who teaches woodworking with tools as a way to show the recently blind what they

are still capable of.

“Her fine motor skills were way ahead of everyone else’s,” said Wurtzel, who has

an upcoming show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in September.

Tools were not an obstacle, but another opportunity to express the things locked

inside her. She nicked her fingers with the metal chisels and other hand tools early

on, but the creative skills she’d honed over the years were clear.

“What you create, it’s not in your eyeballs,” he told her, “it’s in your head.”

At one point, he handed her an abstract project: three blocks of wood fused together.

He carved the short end into the wing of a bird. He told her his idea is that it

was like her, a bird that crashed into a block of wood and became embedded inside.

She held the wooden sculpture in her hands, fingered the finished side and then the

rough untouched wooden rectangle on the other end.

She carved the other side into a dagger.

“This is what I’m going to use to cut myself free,” she said.

“When she did that, I knew she was serious about it,” Wurtzel said. “She was not

going to take no for an answer.”

He taught her to be fearless in the dark. He taught her to use a table saw, a wood-turning

lathe, even a chainsaw which she used to carve a stylized heart out of a block of

ice.

“How do you teach a deaf-blind person to uses a chainsaw? From behind them,” Wurtzel

said.

He dedicated a page to her on his website,

www.gmwurtzel.com

, under the heading Inspiration.

“This man has given me a priceless gift and showed me a valuable lesson: That sight

has nothing to do with making art. It’s the vision within that matters,” she said

in her speech to NOCCA.

When she wanted to make a wooden bust of a person lying down, Wurtzel called in his

lifelong friend, Stephen Handschu, a sculptor from Tampa born with 5 percent vision,

who happened to be in Minneapolis.

“When you first meet her, you think a breeze would blow her away,” Handschu said.

“But you speak to her for five minutes and think, ‘My God, I’m speaking to a giant.’”

Handschu spent 70 hours — all in one week — working with her in wood and clay. She

would come in at 8 a.m. and at 8 p.m. he would have to tell her, “Emilie, it’s time

to quit.”

“That was a life-and-death issue for her,” Handschu said. “She was determined she

had to ‘get it’ and quickly, to return to Cooper Union to get her degree.”

A banquet of art

She returned to New York and started back at Cooper Union in January of last year

and returned to work with Arsham, all while living alone. More than ever, she explored

making art you could feel with your hands as well as your soul. And when she sculpted

a pair of cradling hands that also looked like a dove, “Bird Sitting” won the Award

of Excellence from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Her work was displayed at the Smithsonian.

“Emilie’s not going to have an easy time of it,” said the artist Arsham, who invited

Emilie back into his studio. “She’s going to struggle to make her art, to bring it

to the public. But I think if it were easy, she’d probably do something else.”

For her senior thesis project at Cooper, she tapped into what she’d learned in Minneapolis.

She sculpted 110 bowls out of clay, carved 130 forks out of wood and used them to

serve a spaghetti dinner for her final art show earlier this month. The bowls were

unglazed, so the spaghetti in red sauce left a mark, like a memory, in each bowl

as they were stacked by a sink she also handmade out of ceramics.

She served each of the more-than 300 people who so overwhelmed the art studio they

had to enter in groups of 60 and even sit on the floor, Emilie feeling her way around

them. Arsham, who was at her exhibition, noted she “reinvented her own language of

sculpture.”

“I wanted to mesh the line between functional objects and art, so people could experience

my art in more ways than one. I wanted to change the perception people have of art,

by inviting them to take part in it. To talk, to move, to eat, and to touch, it is

all a part of the art work,” she said. “The whole performance was about the act of

giving, helping and sharing.”

Graduation was a formality. She already has a job working in education and media

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers from several artists to work in their studios,

and is making

her own art

in a shared space in Brooklyn.

Blindness took her sight, but not her vision. Plunged into darkness, Emilie learned

to see.

“I understand that nothing is really different, the world is still the same,” she

said, “and I am still me.”

STORIES TO SHARE?

Email us at: personaljourneys at pbpost.com

PERSONAL JOURNEYS REPORTER

Carlos Frías

is a features writer and occasional columnist for The Palm Beach Post. He’s a father,

runner, author and recovering sportswriter who remains a voting member of the Baseball

Writers Association of America. He joined the Post in 2004 from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,

where he covered the Atlanta Braves. His memoir, “Take Me With You: A Secret Search

for Family in a Forbidden Cuba,” (Simon and Schuster, 2009) was based on the five-day

Post series, “Mi Familia,” for which he was named the Cox Writer of the Year in 2006.

PERSONAL JOURNEYS REPORTER

Carlos Frías

is a features writer and occasional columnist for The Palm Beach Post. He’s a father,

runner, author and recovering sportswriter who remains a voting member of the Baseball

Writers Association of America. He joined the Post in 2004 from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,

where he covered the Atlanta Braves. His memoir, “Take Me With You: A Secret Search

for Family in a Forbidden Cuba,” (Simon and Schuster, 2009) was based on the five-day

Post series, “Mi Familia,” for which he was named the Cox Writer of the Year in 2006.

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Comment(s) 1-2 of 2

VentureJim's avatar

VentureJim

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This is such an inspirational story.  I read it this morning and have reflected on

it all day.  Thank you for writing it.  This woman will change lives with the people

she comes in contact with, both by her example and her talent.  I certainly am motivated.

At the age of 70 I am about to start a new business and she has given me the courage

to pursue my dream.

4:48 p.m. Jun.  8, 2014

sunnypalmbeachcounty's avatar

sunnypalmbeachcounty

Report

Admirable human being. The kind we'd love to meet more often and my heart goes with

her and her enormous courage to BE and BEHAVE like us.

Then .........  ! not once in the article was her father mentioned ?

Thank you to THE PALM BEACH POST and excellent writer Carlos Frias for this story

of real life

Agnes

4:56 p.m. Jun.  8, 2014

Comment(s) 1-2 of 2

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